


The Pichichi Project

by Guede



Series: Ghost Quest, Inc. [2]
Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Enemies to Lovers, Film Student Iker Casillas, Ghosts, Humor, M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 11:53:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4745366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Intrepid film students make a ghost movie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pichichi Project

“So here’s the plan,” Iker said. “You get the gear together. I’ll swing by the supermarket later for the food, and once I get the keys from Hierro, we’ll spend the weekend filming in the place. Hey presto, our term project’s all done.”

Personally he thought it was a pretty decent solution to a pretty stupid situation. It was one thing for their professor to bitch about how everybody seemed to think a highlights reel was the same as telling a good story, but it was another to force them all to come up with a short by the end of the month _and_ forbid them to do it on a sports story. If Iker had wanted to be something besides a sports journalist, he wouldn’t be in the _sports journalist program_. But fine, if the professor wanted them to _stretch their imaginations_ and _step out of their comfort zone_ and _recast the storyline_ , then Iker would try to oblige the man. It was his class.

Xavi was giving Iker that look again, like he knew exactly what Iker was stretching his damn imagination to picture as the chestnut Iker had just kicked out of their way. They’d just gotten out of their morning class and should’ve been headed towards lunch like every other student on the sidewalks, but instead they’d been wandering around throwing ideas back and forth for the short, as if they were really engaged with the idea. Which Iker definitely wasn’t, but he always wanted to do his best, and if he couldn’t do the short on the subject his life revolved around, he at least wanted it to be interesting. Not some wannabe “lifestyle” segment for the evening news, which was what most of their classmates would be going for, based on what Iker had overheard on the way out of class.

“Well, it’s an international weekend,” Xavi finally said. “The Spain one’s probably going to be boring, but I kind of wanted to watch Germany too. But I guess I can get my brother to tape the Euro qualifiers. You want—”

“No, I finally gave up and bought a new DVR. Thanks for the offer, though.” Iker knocked another couple of chestnuts away, then looked hard at Xavi. “You don’t like ghost stories?”

Xavi snorted and pushed his elbow at Iker, but that didn’t exactly answer the question. He put up his head, spotting a friend of theirs, and called out a greeting. Then he pulled at his bag-strap, saw Iker still looking at him and sighed. “No, it’s a cool idea. Depending on how good the night shots turn out, maybe we can even reuse the footage for the cinematography class.”

“Still not telling me you love it,” Iker pointed out. They’d known each other since before university and technically he didn’t have to point out Xavi’s bullshit these days. But he was still annoyed about the assignment and Xavi was stalling, and Xavi never stalled. Usually he didn’t bullshit, either.

“Well, because you don’t have the keys to this house.” This time Xavi poked the chestnut aside. Then he stopped and turned, and looked seriously up at Iker. “Do you really think the dean’s going to give them to you? I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t think he does either, and he’s never let anybody stay there overnight. And I know people have asked.”

“People who weren’t me.” Iker grinned at the skepticism that came over Xavi’s face. Then he clapped the other man on the shoulder and twisted away, spotting Ramos and a couple of girls walking towards them. “Listen, just put in the requests for the camera and everything, since we’ll have to reserve those anyway. I’ll go ask Hierro tonight, and if he says no, then we’ll do the mushroom-hunting idea and I’ll buy you dinner, all right?”

* * *

The house in question wasn’t actually a house. It had been built as one for some rich merchant over a century ago, but his heirs had donated the place to the university, which with typical dull-mindedness had converted it into an administrative building. These days it was used for student records and staff offices and the occasional faculty meeting—but never after dark.

Iker wasn’t really an architectural person, but as he looked up at the gables, he had to wonder at the kind of person who’d think about filing when they saw the house. It was bigger than some of the lecture halls, and had obviously been meant for grand balls where everybody showed up in front of the massive, angel-encrusted front door in Cinderella-type carriages. And even aside from the size of it, it just didn’t look like the sort of place where you stuck things you wanted to forget about. It wasn’t exactly tasteful—at least, these days most people didn’t want to live with naked cherubs grinning at you every few meters—but it wasn’t dark and gloomy either. The windows were large and the overall color scheme was a sort of pastel yellow. Iker had grown up across the street from a church that had looked more gothic.

A face looked out one of the windows. It blinked as Iker started, then put its hand to his face with a familiar air of exasperation; Iker rolled his eyes as he shook himself out of his reverie and trotted up the steps. Why Hierro always looked like that when he came by, he never understood. It wasn’t like he brought half the trouble that some of the professors did.

The dean’s office by tradition was on the second floor, in a room with a hideously tacky fresco of bulls and topless dancers who had apparently glued melons to their chests. Some history student Iker had dated a few times had told him it was modeled after ancient Crete, one of the cradles of modern civilization. Maybe that made Hierro a philistine for shoving bookcases in front of it, but Iker couldn’t blame the man. It had to be hard to concentrate when nipples the size, color and shape of piquillos were pointing straight at your desk.

“Iker.” By the time Iker got to the door, Hierro had put aside his irritation and was welcoming him with a smile. “How are you? Did your father—”

“It’s fixed, but it still doesn’t really sound right, so he and I are going to take it to a shop later this month.” Iker hugged the other man and let him show them into the office. He wandered off a bit as Hierro turned back to close the door. “I wanted to take it in right away, but he’s stubborn and won’t let me rent him a damn car in the meantime.”

Hierro laughed, but not in a mocking way. He knew Iker’s father well enough to sympathize. They chatted about family for a few minutes and then Hierro offered Iker a coffee, which was his sign for getting down to business. Iker turned down the cup and perched himself on the arm of Hierro’s couch, not missing the way Hierro’s left eyebrow twitched at that.

“So apparently, the best way to learn about narrative film-making is to crush your students’ spirits,” Iker said by way of introduction. He put his hands down on the couch arm and rocked his weight a little for some reason. It wasn’t that he was too nervous, because he’d thought it all over and there really was nothing to be nervous about. And anyway Hierro had seen him in some truly embarrassing situations and he’d lived, and he just needed to get on with it. Xavi was waiting on him. “You’re going to have a lot of angry student evaluations at the end of term.”

Touchy about his couch or not, Hierro didn’t say anything about it. He’d been looking at some files before Iker had come in and he picked one up, but kept his eyes on Iker. His expression was open and mildly curious, and not really taking Iker seriously. Perfect. Well, all right, a bit annoying, since it always made Iker want to point out he wasn’t running head-first into Hierro’s waist during their Sunday park matches anymore, but he could work with it.

“Then I’ll read them very carefully,” Hierro replied, tone just shy of dry. He flipped a page in his folder, glanced at it, and looked back at Iker. “Are you here to register a complaint early?”

“Me?” Iker arched his brows in offended innocence, then grinned at the dubious look Hierro gave him. “Well, first I think I’m going to make sure I don’t fail the class.”

Hierro went back to reading his file. It had a label on it, but with the way Hierro was holding it, Iker could only read a bit in the middle. _—id Vil—_ something something. “That’s always a good goal to have.”

“So Xavi and I were bouncing ideas off each other, and we thought it’d be interesting to profile a bit of campus history. If it turns out well, maybe you can even use it for recruiting.” Maybe that was a little too cute—nah, Hierro was still half-ignoring Iker. “So I was wondering if we could come film in here this weekend.”

Another page flipped. “In here?”

“Not of anybody working, so there’s no problem with consent or something like that. We just want to do a history of the building, so we were thinking we’d come in when most people are gone,” Iker explained. He was watching Hierro so carefully that he surprised himself by running out of breath. And then he was looking even more carefully, but Hierro didn’t seem to have noticed the hitched gasp. Actually, Hierro was glowering at the folder, which honestly should’ve been on fire by this point. “The idea is, we’d talk about how the use of buildings evolves and how one can start out as one thing and end as another.”

Hierro snapped shut the folder, but kept glaring at it for a little longer. Then he sighed and the anger melted off, revealing the deep disappointment underneath. He tossed the folder onto a nearly shelf and then went to his desk, giving Iker an off-hand glance as he did. “So you want to borrow the keys, then.”

“Yeah, in case we end up coming in on Sunday instead of Saturday. We want to do it Saturday morning, but Xavi’s maybe got a family commitment. He’s still seeing if he can get out of it.” Iker slid off the couch, absently tugging his shirt down. He heard his phone beep and pulled it out to find he’d missed a call from his brother. Probably forgot his gym bag again. “If this weekend’s not good, then I guess next weekend, but that’d be pushing it with the due date. And, well, I’d have to skip a home game.”

A smile finally cracked Hierro’s face, though he was still looking grumpy about whatever had been in the folder. He spared a moment from rummaging in the papers on his desk to pull out a drawer and rummage in there, and then Iker heard the clink of metal. “Well, we can’t have that,” he said, pulling out a set of keys. He used his thumbnail to pry off a smaller ring that was hanging off the main one, which he then tossed to Iker. “These are only to the front and back doors, and they’re my only spare right now.”

“We weren’t really planning to sneak into people’s offices and doctor our files, you know. Xavi’s grades are already tops and if I have that problem, I know where to go,” Iker said lightly, grinning as he shoved the keys into his pocket. “Thanks! I’ll drop them off on Monday morning before class.”

Then he turned to go. He had his hand on the door and was looking at his happy reflection in its glass pane when Hierro called to him, so he got to watch his eyes widen and his cheeks get all sucked in with panic. Then he moved his hand to the knob, pulled himself together, and looked over his shoulder.

“I know you’ll be respectful, and I like Xavi too,” Hierro started. His voice dropped into a mournful register and he paused, his eyes drifting downwards. For a moment he looked like he wasn’t going to go on, but then his shoulders went back and his head up, and his gaze did its best to nail Iker to the door. “But you’ll remember about the curfew.”

“And the third floor,” Iker said, adopting a dutiful tone. “I don’t know how I’d ever forget those stories. My mother’s still a bit mad you and Dad even told them to us, you know.”

Hierro didn’t quite roll his eyes, because of course he’d never do that in reference to somebody’s family. But he sat down at his desk with the firm air of a man who knew he’d done right and was going to peacefully sleep on his choices, right after he finished his day’s work. Which meant he was done with Iker, who got out of there with a spring in his step and even a little wave for the old mansion as he walked out the doors. He was actually starting to look forward to seeing it again on the weekend.

* * *

“So there’s no problem,” Iker said triumphantly, dropping the keys on the table. “He didn’t even quiz me on what we were doing. I’m starting to think the whole haunted thing was more Hierro trying to scare people off so he’d have the place to himself.”

“Well, there’s a little bit of a problem.” Xavi put down his menu, ordered them a slew of tapas and two beers, and then looked at Iker with a bland sort of concern. “All the university cameras were checked out by the time I got there, so I asked a friend if we could borrow his. He said fine, but he wanted to come along. I figured we could use an extra pair of hands for the boom.”

Iker blinked a few times. He’d been well into celebratory mode and it was a bit jarring to have to get out of it, especially when, if he was honest with himself, he had been worried they wouldn’t be able to get into the house. Then he processed what the other man had said and shrugged. “Oh. That was…damn, that was fast. I figured everyone else would still be freaking out over the stupid assignment. But we’ve still got a camera and everything, that’s what you’re saying?”

Xavi nodded. He was still staring at Iker like he thought Iker was going to…

“Wait, which friend of yours has videotaping equipment like that lying around?” It took a moment for Iker to go through their respective circles. Not because he didn’t already know, but because he was going to be pissed off and he wanted a little more time to prepare himself, since Xavi was otherwise a great guy. And then he was pissed off anyway. “And he’s coming because he thinks I’m going to jam up his fucking gear? Great, that’s so trustworthy, like you would be friends with somebody like that. He—”

“We’re going to need a third,” Xavi pointed out. Just then their beers arrived and he had to hold up his chin and crane around and do all sorts of dodgy things to be seen around their server, and it wasn’t a bit funny. “One to hold the camera, one to hold the boom, the assignment said we can’t both be off-camera—”

“—is a shit! A complete shit! The last time, I was trying to be _nice_ and he broke the sprinklers—”

A flicker of frustration passed over Xavi’s face. He gave up on talking over Iker and slouched back in the booth, just holding his beer and listening to Iker and generally being patient enough to guilt Iker quiet. Then he spread his hands, his expression half-helpless, half-determined. “Look, I talked to Victor, and he promised he’d try and watch his temper. He’s not coming because he doesn’t trust us—” slight emphasis on the word, like a verbal elbow-poke “—it’s because he needs to do the assignment too, and he hasn’t gotten a new partner since Andrés switched majors.”

“I forgot he was in our class,” Iker said after a moment.

Xavi didn’t look surprised. Or mad either, though he was maybe a touch amused, the same way Hierro sometimes seemed like he got a kick out of scolding professors for being too outrageous. “The way you two act around each other, it’s like watching two totally separate dimensions at the same time. Anyway, it wasn’t really a great idea, what you said to him about the last European Cup.”

“It was true, though. I dug up the archival footage to…fine.” Iker finally reached for his beer. He took a pull at it, then put the bottom down against the table so that he could roll the neck between his fingers. “Fine.”

Xavi was still staring at him.

Iker shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably a few times, then swung his arm up over the back of the booth. He drank more beer and looked off towards the door. “Fine, I’ll _try_ not to argue with him about football. Or history. Or anything else. But if he brings up the Champions League semi-finals from 2001…”

“I made him promise not to,” Xavi said, pulling his own beer towards him. Then he stopped, looking the same way Iker was. He grinned and pushed his beer away, and lifted his arm to hug David Silva as the other man came bouncing over.

“Hey! I thought you guys would be off moaning and groaning about interview practice again.” Silva extricated himself from Xavi, let Iker scruff his head, and then settled on the seat by Iker. He swung his backpack off his shoulder with a grunt. “Like, life is _sooooo_ hard, asking people questions for a living.”

Rolling his eyes, Iker slouched down in the booth till his feet hit the bottom of the opposite seat. “If this is a lead-in to something gross from your dissection class, I don’t want to hear it. I haven’t had dinner yet.”

“You suck, Iker,” Silva said cheerfully, gesturing for their waiter to come back over. He worked one of the evening shifts at the place, so pretty much everyone was friends with him. Either that or they’d get decaf when they were trying to cram for exams, but Silva was a nice kid with a sense of humor who didn’t usually abuse his position of power, so it wasn’t torture or anything. “So when am I supposed to tell you? Once you’ve eaten, you’re always like, I just ate, don’t make me sick or I’ll come to clinic and toss all over Guaje. Why are you so mean to him, anyway?”

“Villa? I’m not mean to him.” Iker caught Xavi snorting into his beer and stared hard at him. Which just made Xavi give up on hiding it and smirk right at him, so Iker put his head back on the top of the booth so he wouldn’t have to put up with the abuse. “He just…looks like it.”

A fringe of black hair came into view, and then a pair of sarcastic eyes. “Looks like what?” Villa asked.

For a moment Iker stiffened and was embarrassed—he had sharp hearing and prided himself on never getting startled—but Villa didn’t wait around for an answer, or even a reaction from Iker. He kept moving, and by the time Iker had straightened up, Villa had bent down to mess around on the floor by the booth. Silva was trying to make him stop, but Villa just ignored him while muttering things about Iker’s eyesight and film students always Photoshopping fake shit and something about people never believing the truth till it got them a door in the head.

“So, there’s Victor,” Xavi suddenly said.

Iker started and looked up just in time to meet Victor’s eyes as the man walked into the café. Victor paused, like he thought Iker was going to leap over Silva and go for him right there like some action movie. Then he shook his head and came slowly over, creaking all the way because he thought riding a motorcycle in a leather jacket and fingerless gloves made him the campus badass. Getting caught out for the second time in as many minutes already had Iker annoyed and Victor’s palpable air of superiority wasn’t helping, but Xavi’s kick under the table made Iker press his lips together. He’d said he’d try.

Once he was over, Victor said hi curtly to Xavi. Silva gave him a friendly greeting, and apparently Victor didn’t come here for his late-night coffee, because that made his brows arch. He stood there for a moment and Villa got up and nearly backed into him. Victor swung away, putting his hand on the table for balance, and was opening his mouth when Villa glowered up at him.

“What the fuck are you doing there?” Villa demanded. Then he turned to Silva, who was looking about as mortified as Victor was poleaxed, and kept Iker from pissing off Xavi with giggles by giving Silva a peck on the side of the face. “Raúl just called and his stupid fucking agent got him stuck in another fucking interview, so I’m going home. I’ll drop off our shit and get his car and get him, and pick you up on the way back. Okay?” 

Silva stopped looking embarrassed and started glowing like somebody had sprinkled him with glitterified bronzer. “’kay.”

Villa stomped off and the waiters took the opportunity to slide in with Xavi and Iker’s food, darting in and out on either side of an increasingly annoyed Victor. Finally Victor shouldered his way to Xavi’s side of the booth and threw himself down on the seat with enough force to make the table rock. He didn’t seem to care that he’d rattled rice off their plates, but just slumped down with one hand flicking hair out of his eyes. “Asshole,” he said in Silva’s direction.

“No hello?” Iker couldn’t help saying. Then he bit down on the inside of his mouth to keep from grimacing at Xavi’s kick.

“Um, no, but…okay, yeah, he’s like that a lot when you don’t really know him. Sorry.” Somewhere along the line Silva had gotten his order changed through his magical connections with the other café staff, and had been given two beers. He handed one to Victor, whose grumpy expression only marginally lightened, and then fumbled his open, all downcast eyes and awkward elbows in Iker’s ribs that would’ve made Iker mad, if the kid hadn’t already looked like a traumatized kitten. “I mean, I’m pretty sure we did get introduced at that party, right? But David probably doesn’t remember. It was in the middle of some, um, complicated shit for him.”

Victor cocked a disbelieving brow at Silva that suddenly skewed funny. His lips pressed tight together and he shifted in his seat, twisting slightly away from Xavi. Then he saw Iker looking and flicked his eyes away, snorting. Which didn’t earn him another elbow from Xavi, and Iker and Xavi were going to have words about that later. Just because Iker wasn’t as small and cute as Silva didn’t mean he didn’t deserve a good defender, too.

“So it must be pretty busy again?” Xavi was saying to Silva. “With the new book and everything. If David’s running around picking up Raúl—”

“And what’s with that, anyway? Last I checked, Raúl still doesn’t let anybody drive that car of his except Mori,” Iker broke in. And yeah, he sounded annoyed at that too, and there really was no reason for Xavi to be giving him the eye about it. He was a good driver, thank you, and had known Raúl long enough, and suddenly here was _David Villa_ horning in after less than a year. “Is it to make up for what they say?”

Silva blinked wide, uncomprehending eyes, then took a pull from his beer like an experienced barfly. “What? What who says?”

“I heard there’s going to be a movie,” Victor said abruptly. He glanced around, like they didn’t have any reason to wonder where he was going with that, and then had the decency to look a little uncomfortable at Silva’s curious expression. “Of the book. It’s…that’s good for you, right?”

Xavi didn’t often look desperate, but he stabbed his fork into his sausage right then like it was his dying faith in humanity. Thankfully, Silva somehow divined what the hell Victor was doing and grinned. “Oh! Well, it’s not a sure thing yet, so I don’t want to jinx it, but yeah, maybe. Raúl’s really happy. He thinks maybe we can finish up the house this summer with the advance money, but even if it doesn’t happen, it’s good news.”

“But isn’t that bad for you? Then you guys have to move out, don’t you? Because it’s not like he’s going to need tenants anymore,” Iker said. He started poking at his own food, then had to cough to hide his hiss. He didn’t even know why Xavi had kicked him that time, and anyway, the whole thing was getting old. If Xavi didn’t start explaining why the hell he was bruising up Iker’s shins, Iker was going to kick _him_. “I’m kind of surprised you don’t mind living there, actually. I know it’s all fictional, but the way he describes the house, everybody knows it’s his.”

“But the ghosts are fake, so what’s the problem?” Victor asked. When Iker looked up, Victor was half-turned away, giving his order to the waitress—the staff had switched on them, and the girl was fluttering lashes at Victor—so maybe he hadn’t meant to be as insulting as he’d just sounded. “I didn’t think it was that scary anyway. It was a good book, but more about history than horror.”

“So you’re glad I made you read it,” Xavi said, not quite as smug as he could’ve been because he was trying to glare at Iker at the same time. “Anyway, Raúl’s just not going to kick you out, right? That doesn’t seem like him.”

Silva had been watching them all with a funny sort of look on his face, like he was trying not to laugh and like he was trying not to be all contemptuous of them, which was _not_ like him. Then he started and blinked at Xavi. “Huh? No, of course not. It’s a big house, and Raúl says we can stay as long as we want, since it’s not like he’s going to use the rest of the place anyway. Listen, guys, nice talking to you but I’ve got to go to work. You need anything, just call for me, okay?”

They all assented—even Victor, though he still looked like he was just trying to avoid Xavi’s elbows. Silva got up and bounced off to be enveloped by the good-natured banter of the other café staff, while the booth fell quiet for a few minutes. Iker started in on his dinner.

“Being an asshole about Villa isn’t going to get you Raúl’s car keys,” Xavi suddenly said.

Iker looked up. He noted the confused but intently interested expression on Victor’s face, and also the way Victor hurriedly pretended he wasn’t listening and was instead eyeing their waitress’ ass. “What are you talking ab—oh. Well, look, it’s not a rumor. It’s true. That jackass in the book is obviously meant to be Villa. Anyone who’s met him for more than five minutes—and plus I have confirmation.”

“Jackass? You mean the hero who got rid of all the ghosts?” Victor looked back at Iker, and if that wasn’t a come-punch-me glittering in his eye, Iker didn’t know his assholes. “Yeah, he was cranky, but he had a lot going on. I can’t really blame him.”

“Anyway, speaking about ghosts…I’m not going in there if you two are going to be like this all night. I could be watching Spain and Hungary, all right?” An unusually sharp note had entered Xavi’s tone. He had stopped eating and was looking at them kind of how Hierro tended to look at government officials who wanted to slash the university funding. “It’s a goddamn team project, you know.”

After a moment, Iker sighed and looked down at the table. He honestly didn’t think he’d been that badly-behaved—or at least he hadn’t given out worse than he’d gotten, but the thing about angry Xavi was that it always made him feel like he’d failed. “Sorry. I just want to get this over with. Once we get filming, we’ll be busy enough.”

“You’re not worried about going in there, are you?” Victor asked. Then Xavi turned and looked at him, and he grimaced and made sullen movements with his shoulders and finally threw his head back so he was staring out the window. “Not like, you can’t be worried if that’s what you feel. Okay? I’m not—but just, if you’re—”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Iker shut his mouth till he didn’t feel the urge to go on, in great and insulting detail. Then he opened it and put food in it, and chewed. He felt better after he’d swallowed and remembered he wasn’t the one who had had to buy his own camera after he’d destroyed one of the university’s in a temper tantrum. “It’s more…Hierro does, and he really won’t be happy if he knows we’re in there after dark. Right now he doesn’t, and if you want to be all honest and go tell him, go ahead, but there goes the project.”

Victor snorted and crossed his arms over his chest. Now he was staring at the ceiling. “I’ve got no problem. So long as, if the dean finds out, you’re not going to drop us to save yourself.”

“So,” Xavi said wearily, after a long moment of silence. “Where and when should we meet up?”

* * *

Hierro was normally the last one to leave and Iker knew he never got home later than seven, so they agreed to go in at seven-thirty Friday night. There was a popular bar not too far from the place that a lot of students frequented, so they would rendezvous there first. It wouldn’t look that weird for them to be going out of there at night, and also, Iker was friends with the bartender so they could drop their bags and the filming gear off at the bar beforehand instead of having to lug them around all day.

At least, Iker had been friends with the bartender. Right now Pepe was ticking him off. “Funny, Reina.”

“Of course it isn’t. But you have to admit, if it was anyone else, you’d be laughing your head off.” Pepe dumped a double-handful of lime slices into a square plastic box, pushed the box under the counter and then began to rinse his hands off in the sink. “Three men, a dark house, lots of tension…”

“You make this sound like it’s going to be a porno,” Iker said, making a face at the other man. Then he reached over the bar and dug around till he’d come up with a box of toothpicks. He opened it and started to make patterns with the toothpicks on the bar. “Xavi’s got his eternal more than a girlfriend girlfriend and Valdés is a total shit.”

“Stop that. I need those for martinis,” Pepe scolded. He took back the box but left Iker the toothpicks Iker had already taken out. After some messing around with a dish-towel, he moved aside some stacks of glasses and leaned on the counter, looking speculatively at Iker. When Iker gave him the eye, Pepe just shrugged it off. “It might have helped if his first introduction to you hadn’t been you screaming in his face about cheating Barça sons of whores.”

Iker refused to feel ashamed. “It’s not _my_ fault Xavi decided to introduce us while we were watching El Clásico. Besides, it’s not like Xavi and I ever had a problem about that, and we used to wrestle each other over referee calls till our fathers carried us off.”

“That’s because Xavi is inhumanly forgiving when it comes to you.” Pepe frowned at a glass, then picked it up and held it to the light. He blew on the side, then rubbed at some nonexistent smear with the towel. “Not everybody is Xavi.”

“Yeah.” For a moment Iker was quiet. He wasn’t really an asshole, outside of certain life-or-death football matches, and he knew he pushed his friends sometimes, and knew how good it was for them to just roll their eyes and wait for him to get over it. But he acknowledged that too, and he liked to think he did the same for them. “I still have scarring on one ankle from his teeth, you know. And you should’ve seen Hierro yelling at us, and Xavi just—” Iker couldn’t help a fond snicker at the memory “—just sticking his chin up and taking it. I mean, he said sorry later, and bought me a popsicle with his allowance, but right then, he just wasn’t going to take it.”

The obnoxious cooing sound broke Iker out of his reverie. He scattered the toothpicks all over reaching across to smack Pepe in the head, then good-naturedly helped the man hunt out the stupid little twigs from the nooks and crannies behind the bar.

“Anyway, I’m just saying that you could be a little easier on Valdés. He hasn’t had the easiest time here,” Pepe said casually. When Iker looked up at him, he was staring hard at the label of a bottle of vodka, the tip of his tongue sticking weirdly out of the side of his mouth. Then he glanced up, saw Iker and turned to put the vodka back on the rack. “He comes in here sometimes. Sits way in the back, doesn’t talk to people, but never minds helping me close up.”

“That just sounds weird to me,” Iker finally said. He started playing with the toothpicks again. “I did try to be nice later. But talking to him is like talking to Villa. You start off good and they get offended at nothing, and next thing you know, they’re trying to bury their head in your stomach.”

Pepe stopped with one arm up for a wine bottle and arched an eyebrow at Iker.

“Okay, that was just Villa. At least when Victor’s being a bastard, I can look him in the eye without hurting my neck.” Iker balanced one toothpick on its end, using his forefinger to hold the top in place. He bent down, closed one eye, then lifted his head and looked hard past Pepe. Then he bent down again and carefully flicked the toothpick’s middle so it soared in a perfect arc…into Pepe’s waiting hand. “Reina!”

Ignoring him, Pepe dumped the toothpick into the trashcan it would’ve gone to without the intervention. Then the other man came over and took away the rest of Iker’s toothpicks for good measure. He squashed himself down while Iker was protesting and craned his head to stare up at Iker till Iker finally gave up with a sigh. “Iker. It’s a couple hours. You’ll deal, and then you’ll all come back here and tell me whether there’s anything to those stories after all, and maybe even you’ll knock back a few beers with Victor. Experiences like these can be bonding.”

Iker snorted, but something inside of him that he hadn’t even known was wound up…relaxed. Which was why he put up with Pepe.

“And if all else fails, Victor’s not bad on the eyes,” Pepe said, adopting the blandest tone possible. He stared back at Iker in all seriousness. “Great asses are great even when they’re attached to asses.”

“It’ll be dark, and he wears a lot of black,” Iker finally managed.

Pepe shrugged. “So accidentally run into him. If it’s that dark, you’ll need to use your hands to—”

“We’re not having this conversation.” Iker got off the stool and went a step towards the door, then stopped. He wavered a moment, then stalked back to the bar. “And where the _hell_ did that come from, anyway? Are you going crazy, Reina?”

“You’d be cute together!” Pepe protested. He even put his hand to his heart, all soulful eyes.

“First of all,” Iker started, and then was out of breath. He stopped and inhaled deeply, then put his hands on the counter and breathed again. “First of all, not remotely a possibility. Second, I’m not even looking right now. And—”

“And third, if you’re going to come in while I’m prepping for opening, that’s fine, but don’t expect to just sit there.” Pepe went back to making cocktail garnishes as if they hadn’t just stepped into the Twilight Zone for a few minutes. “At least, not without me taking the piss out of you.”

Iker breathed out a third time, thankful that the world was right-side up again. Then he focused on his so-called friend.

It took a couple minutes for Pepe to catch on, but by then Iker was around the bar and within lunging distance. Pepe grabbed him but Iker twisted and slammed the ice cubes down the back of the other man’s shirt, and then scrambled to get away from the roaring, shivering man.

* * *

Iker had an afternoon seminar he wanted to attend, so he eventually had to give up on getting Pepe for his awful sense of humor. He was delayed after class when he ran into Fernando and Olalla, and made it back to the bar a few minutes late.

Which turned out to be fine, since Xavi hadn’t shown up either, and it wasn’t like they _had_ to go in at a specific time so long as Hierro had left the building. Unfortunately, Victor had shown up, and the bar was getting slammed so Iker didn’t really have an excuse to talk to Pepe instead. He gave Pepe a wave—and a dirty look, because even juggling three shakers, Pepe still managed to look smug—and made himself go over to greet Victor.

“So where’s our stuff?” was the first thing out of Victor’s mouth.

He looked different. It took a second for Iker to figure out the other man had ditched the leather jacket and was wearing a plain black hoodie. “In the back office. I got the key from the hostess, so we can go get it now.’

Victor was already pushing by Iker, so Iker finished up looking at the man’s back. He bit his lip, then gave himself a shake and followed. Hopefully Xavi would show up soon and run interference—which wasn’t really fair to him, but sometimes fair and everybody surviving to the end didn’t go hand-in-hand.

They got into the back office and Victor immediately picked up his camera bag. Iker blinked, then caught the other man by the arm. And then he almost had to put up his other arm over his face, because Victor jerked like he was going to smash an elbow into it. “Jesus, don’t tell me you’re jumpy already.”

“I’m _not_ j—shut up.” Victor shook off Iker and reached for his backpack.

“What are you doing?” Iker said. He heard somebody in the hall and closed the door, then leaned on it. Whoever it was, they were probably just looking for the bathroom, but no reason to make them curious. “Xavi’s not here yet. We don’t need to grab everything till he—”

“He said he’d meet us at the house,” Victor muttered. He got the backpack over, but as he started to swing it on, the strap of his camera bag slid off his shoulder. He dropped the backpack, grabbed wildly at the camera bag and then grimaced as the backpack smacked against the floor.

Iker let out his breath slowly and counted to five. “Well, thanks for bringing it up.”

Victor was still staring at his backpack. Then he blinked a few times and looked up. “Huh?”

“Never mind,” Iker said under his breath. Now he was annoyed at Xavi—the man could’ve texted him or something. “So we’ll have to split Xavi’s things between us.”

“I can get them.” After carefully putting down the camera bag, Victor reached for his backpack again. He unzipped it and put in one hand, rummaging around till he sighed in relief. Then he took his hand out, zipped the bag up again and slung it over his shoulders. “Just pass them over.”

Rolling his eyes, Iker quickly got his backpack and the bag with the sound equipment on. Then he grabbed Xavi’s backpack away from Victor. “You have to carry the camera. Do that and I’ll get these.”

“No, I’ll get them,” Victor insisted. He actually tried to pull the backpack off Iker’s arm, only to have the camera bag swing at Iker’s knees.

Hissing, Victor yanked at the camera bag strap and stopped it just in time for Iker to jerk away. They stared down at the narrow space between them, and then Iker just scooped up Xavi’s other bag from the floor. It was a lot of weight but they didn’t have that far to go. He could manage, he decided.

“The last thing we need is for you to break another camera,” he said, trying hard not to sound as exasperated as he felt. He didn’t really make it work. “Just get the door, okay?”

Much to his surprise, that was exactly what Victor did. He didn’t try for Xavi’s bags anymore, but just let them out the back way. He also didn’t respond to Iker’s question about where Xavi was, or even look at Iker, but that was better than dealing with his mood swings.

They made their way across the street and then down that side of it. Small groups of people were hanging around on the street-corners, but they were all busy looking for their Friday night fun, so nobody really paid attention to Iker and Victor. And they were going away from all the usual nightspots, too, so by the time they made it to the side-street where the house was, they were by themselves.

The sky was still sort of dark purple, so it wasn’t true dark yet. But all the lights in the house were off. Iker should’ve been happy to see that, since it meant everybody was out of the place, but he couldn’t help feeling a little…weird. He’d never actually seen the place like this before, from this close. Only a couple of times when driving by.

“Xavi said at the house,” Victor said. His brow furrowed when Iker started, as if he was going to let Iker have it. “I think he said he’d knock at the back door.”

“Well, then let’s go.” Iker adjusted some of the bags he was holding, then grunted as the weight of one shifted to strain his left side.

The pain of hauling all their things kept his mind busy up until they’d reached the back of the house. It had actually started out as a verandah, but at some point somebody had closed it in with glass, and now it was used as a break-room. A small kitchen had been installed in the corner and it had a couple couches, plus a great view of the surrounding lawn so if anybody noticed them, they’d see too and could get out the front door before they were caught.

Iker let them in, then relocked the door. “I know Xavi’s coming,” Iker said to Victor’s questioning look. “But we’ll stay down here anyway, because I think this is where we should set up and sleep, so we can let him in. I just don’t want anybody else to get in, because idiots do try and I don’t want to make Hierro sorry he lent me the keys.”

“If we’re not the idiots,” Victor muttered. Maybe. He was squatting down by the bags and had his face turned away, but it sounded like something he’d say.

Fine time for him to get nervy now. Iker glanced out over the lawn, wishing Xavi would just show up. Then he frowned and—he blinked, then again and hard. Then he rubbed his right eye, but that shadow hadn’t really moved. Or if it had, it’d probably been the wind in the trees that cast the shadow. It had looked funny, though. It hadn’t moved like a tree.

A small click made Iker look down: Victor was setting out flashlights. Iker bent down and picked one up, only to get a look from Victor. He set his shoulders and reached for his bag, intending to let it go. Only he thought he heard Victor mutter again and it was already going to be a long night, and well, nobody was around to crack jokes or kick him. “Look, what the hell is the problem?”

“What?” Victor looked up, puzzled.

“You know what,” Iker snapped. “What do you think I’m going to do? Steal the flashlight? If I wanted a goddamn flashlight, I wouldn’t set up a whole stupid trip just to get one.”

Victor was still staring at Iker, completely blank-faced, and…just as Iker was starting to believe that the man really didn’t understand, Victor abruptly dropped back on his heels and jerked his chin up at Iker. “No, nobody like you ever needs to work to get something.”

Then he went back to digging in his bag while Iker stared at him. Iker tried to say something, but for some reason his throat didn’t work and he just made a croak. Victor’s shoulders twitched up and down, and _that_ finally got Iker going again. Because if that asshole was _laughing_ at him—he grabbed Victor’s arm. When the other man pulled at it, Iker yanked Victor forward so that the other man went off his feet and grabbed Iker’s shoulder. Iker didn’t really care. “And what the _hell_ does that mean?”

“What do you think?” At first Victor wouldn’t look Iker in the eye and just shoved at Iker’s shoulder, but once he realized Iker wasn’t letting go, he suddenly threw up his head. His eyes were wild and bright in the dark room, and it gave Iker pause.

Which Victor used to haul himself free. He pushed himself back, still staring at Iker. Then he got up and stalked over to the door. He put his hand on the knob and Iker laughed incredulously. “Running out?”

There was still enough light for Iker to see the muscle tic in Victor’s cheek. The other man looked down at his hand, then pulled it from the knob like he’d been burned. He shifted in place, jerky angry movements, and then spun to glare at Iker. “You might be friends with the dean and half the professors on campus, but someday you’re going to be out there by yourself,” he spat. “Have fun being such a jackass then.”

“I will,” Iker snapped back. “Because I’ll have worked my ass off for the right to be one, just like I’ve worked since I got here. Since before that. It’s not my fucking fault who my parents made friends with, but if you think that’s all I’ve got, then you don’t fucking know me.”

“Sure,” Victor snorted. But his posture had deflated a little, the shoulders slumping and the back crumpling. His hand wandered towards the door again, then was snatched away as he stomped to the far side of the room. He was talking to himself, furious and sharp, and then he suddenly banged his hand against the kitchen counter.

It looked like it hurt, and he pulled his hand back against his chest like it did. The whole thing was just like when he’d looked at Iker with that half-crazed stare, like they were fighting a war or something instead of…well, yeah, it was stupid. Iker still had his own anger bubbling up inside, but he wasn’t about to make a bigger deal of this than it was. Not to mention Xavi would kill him if anything really happened to Victor.

When Iker got to his feet, Victor stiffened but didn’t move. Iker took a tentative step forward, watched Victor hunch up, and then edged up till he was about a meter away. “I’m really not…I know people say that about me, but my parents didn’t pull any strings for me,” Iker said. He couldn’t help fidgeting a little and had to stuff his hands into his pockets. This idiot talk never got any easier, no matter how many times he had to give it. “Actually, it’s always been a pain in the ass. You probably don’t know what it’s like when everybody already knows how well you’re going to do.”

Victor snorted. He’d taken his hand from his chest and was gingerly pushing at it with his other hand, flexing the fingers. It looked like it was working all right. “Well, it hasn’t made you less of a jackass,” he said. “I believe your parents wouldn’t have pulled strings for that.”

“You could at least look at me when you’re making that kind of crap judgment about me,” Iker retorted.

“And same to you.” Victor did turn, and blinked when he saw Iker. Maybe he’d been thinking Iker was still across the room or something. He settled against the counter, uncertainty plain on his face. Which was a different look on him. He almost acted like he was really hurt about what Iker was saying. “What do you know about me, anyway? Every time I’ve met you, you’ve been an asshole, so if that’s all I know, it’s not my fault.”

“It is—” Iker started, and then stopped himself. It wasn’t entirely his goddamn fault if they ended up fighting every time they met, but damn it, he was supposed to be even-tempered. “All right. Fine. I’m sorry if…if I haven’t been on my best behavior around you. But you don’t make it that easy, you know.”

It was hard to read Victor’s expression in the dark, and he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to explain it. He stood there and rubbed at his hand—which Iker supposed was a better sign than him losing it again. Then he inhaled like he was going to say something, only a muffled noise got in first.

They looked at each other. Then Victor stepped forward and pointed up at the ceiling with the hand he’d banged. “I thought you said everyone was gone,” he hissed.

“Everyone _is_ gone. Hierro’s always last out, and he turns off the lights.” Iker looked up, then around them, but nothing looked unusual. In fact, just then a car’s headlights went slowly down the road that wound by the house. “It’s an old place and always making noises like that. I’ve heard that sort of thing before.”

“Really?” But Victor was looking back towards his gear, so it seemed like he was buying it.

It wasn’t really a lie, Iker told himself. He had heard a lot of weird noises before that had just been the house settling, or the wind going through some crumbling cranny. Just because he hadn’t heard that particular noise didn’t mean it had a different explanation.

“I wonder what’s keeping Xavi,” Victor mumbled. He glanced at Iker, then gave a stiff shrug. “He said he’d only be ten minutes late.”

“What’s he doing?” Iker asked.

Victor looked at Iker again, but it was only half-heartedly hostile. Then he went over and got himself a flashlight, which he clicked on and pointed at the door to the rest of the house. “He had to get Cesc out of a jam. You know C—”

“That little shit swapped my beer for apple juice once, and then let me bitch out some poor waiter before he told me,” Iker said disgustedly.

The laugh startled both of them. It wasn’t that long and Victor ducked his head afterward like he was ashamed he’d let it out. Then he looked up at Iker, as if he was expecting to get yelled at. Iker just rolled his eyes and turned on his own flashlight. Cesc was fun, but the kind of fun that eventually managed to kick everyone in the ass. If Victor hadn’t found that out yet, he would, and no need for Iker to do anything to make it happen.

“So where exactly are we going in this place?” Victor asked after another moment. He flicked his flashlight around, at first in random patterns and then settling on a slow circle around the door.

“Didn’t Xavi tell you?” Fine, the fact that Victor was even asking was kind of an answer, but the man didn’t need to look so annoyed. Apparently their momentary truce was dying. “Well, I’ve got my phone. If Xavi comes, he can call. Let’s go have a tour. We can at least start plotting shots out.”

* * *

It was awkward even with flashlights and Iker having been in the place a zillion times before, but Iker refused to let Victor flip on any of the lights. Hierro didn’t live that far off, and Iker wouldn’t put it past the man to cruise by at night just to see that everything was all right. So they went slow and tried to keep the stubbed toes to a minimum.

“So you at least know the story, right?” Iker asked as they made their way up the main staircase.

Victor had been looking at something up ahead of them that was making his face tense. He actually shuddered when Iker spoke, and then looked like he was going to throw a fit over Iker seeing it. But finally he managed to just shake his head. “Not really. I’ve heard some weird things, but only from drunk people. Xavi just said there’s supposed to be a ghost in the north wing.”

Xavi was really letting Iker do all the work on this one, and Iker was working extremely hard not to be put out by it. He moved his flashlight to make sure he knew where the chest of drawers by the top of the stairs were—in the dark all the measurements seemed to be just that little bit off compared to his memory—and then grabbed Victor’s arm when the other man tried to head off in the wrong direction. “So way back during a civil war—”

“The Civil War?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s older than that. One of the other ones. I just can’t remember which right now, or maybe it was just a rebellion.” Iker shone the flashlight down the hall and then stopped. He could’ve sworn he’d saw…because he’d moved the flashlight really fast so the shadows looked like they were moving. Victor had been looking too, and when Iker glanced over, the other man wasn’t freaking out or anything. “Anyway, there was fighting, and even families were splitting over it. So the story goes that there were these two men who were best friends, and they’d sworn that no matter what, they’d be loyal to each other.”

Victor pulled his arm from Iker’s grip, but didn’t otherwise make a big deal out of it. He kept shining his flashlight into the rooms they were passing, and it was annoying. It was slowing them down…and to be honest, it wasn’t helping to get rid of the creepy feeling Iker had. Iker really was not the type to get scared easily, but the place was _different_ at night. Barely anything modern was visible, except for the occasional light-switch, and it made him feel like he was walking in somebody else’s house, in somebody else’s time. And Victor sliding his flashlight over the frosted-glass windows in the doors so they glimmered like someone had turned the lights inside the rooms on and off really fast didn’t help.

Then Victor turned to him and Iker realized he’d stopped talking. He pulled at one shoulder and looked out ahead of them for the door they needed. “But when the war came, one guy ended up on one side and the other one on the other. There was a battle, and the one guy was wounded in it, and his side lost. He went to his friend for help, and the friend said he’d hide him in here.”

“It’s big enough,” Victor finally said. He turned around and looked behind them for some reason. “Let me guess: it didn’t work out.”

“Well, there’s where the story gets complicated. We know the friend did bring the man here, and hide him, and…then never came back. And at the time the house was actually abandoned because the owners had run away from the battle, I think.” Iker found the room he wanted and stopped them. It was one of the few doors that didn’t have a glass window in it, and he knew the keys Hierro had given him wouldn’t work on its lock. “By the time somebody came back and went to check on the place, he’d died. I’ve never heard that anybody found out what happened to the friend either, so…what the…”

Victor slewed round sharply. “What?”

Iker didn’t speak, but just pointed at the door that was slowly swinging open. He’d tried the knob anyway, just for the hell of it, and the thing had turned. Weird, and creepy, and he knew it shouldn’t have done that. He _knew_.

The door stopped after a few centimeters, which wasn’t enough for them to look inside. Not that either of them were trying; Victor still looked confused and was waiting for an explanation that Iker suddenly didn’t feel like giving.

It was dead silent. The hall was dark and seemed to stretch on forever to the small lighter patch where the staircase let some light into it. That damn door shouldn’t have opened, and Iker didn’t know what the hell to do.

And then—he knew he’d better turn around, like the way he always knew when people were coming up to him before he saw them, like the way he’d known which way the ball would go back when he was younger and had thought he might be a footballer, before the whole knee thing. Iker whipped around and saw the door gape open, and _something_ in the room behind Victor. He cried out and Victor’s eyes widened, but the man just—the fucking idiot just stood there. And the thing got on Victor’s shoulder and pulled him back, and it was all Iker could do to grab Victor’s wrist before Victor completely disappeared into the room.

The door was swinging shut again, a blackish blur cutting down like a sword. Iker couldn’t let go of Victor’s wrist so he jammed the flashlight in between the door and the jamb, and the wood crashed against the metal handle. Then pressed down, rocking back and forth slightly so it grated against the flashlight. It was a horrible sound, but worse were the stifled gasps behind the door.

“Victor!” Iker hissed. He yanked on the wrist and almost collapsed when the fingers convulsively scratched at him. At least the man was alive. “Victor!”

“Get—” muffled noise, like cloth sucked into something “—oh, _fuck_ —”

Iker could feel Victor’s wrist slipping from him, and could feel his heels sliding on the floor towards the door. He couldn’t hold the flashlight and hold himself back, so he gritted his teeth and let go of the flashlight. It stayed in place, gripped between the door and the jamb, and he shoved the heel of his free hand against the doorway for some leverage. Dug his nails into Victor’s wrist, which had to hurt but he’d apologize _after_ he got the other man out.

“Goddamn it, Victor—” Goddamn house, goddamn late Xavi, goddamn project. Whatever had Victor wasn’t giving way. “Move right! Right!”

There was a moaning kind of sound, which might or might not have been Victor. Iker didn’t have the time to think about it. He jammed his shoulder against the doorway and kicked the door as hard as he could.

It resisted, like something heavy was shoved up against it. Then it suddenly gave way. The flashlight fell down, hit Iker’s arm so hard he thought the bone broke, and then bounced off inside the room. Bright dots danced in front of Iker and he was dizzy from the pain, but he remembered to pull backward, and a warm body slammed into him, knocking them both to the floor.

“Iker?” called a voice. It was familiar but Iker’s brain couldn’t put familiarity together with a name.

Anyway, Iker was too busy to be recognizing strange voices anyway. He was still wavering on the edge of blacking out, but things were keeping him just this side of conscious. Hot, ragged, sobbing breath on his shoulder and throat. Somebody yanking at his arm. Remembering that that _thing_ had grabbed Victor and the door was still open and—Iker got up, somehow. Dragged himself and Victor down the hall, the two of them practically tumbling over each other, and then nearly falling head-first down the stairs. Somebody caught him and he shouted and hit at them, and had his arms pinned down.

“Iker, Iker.” Voice he remembered. Made him relax, for some reason. “Iker, it’s all right. It never comes downstairs.”

“He needs to let go of—my God.” Second voice, also familiar. “Fernando, we need to…Iker. Let go of Victor. I need to look at him.”

“It’s fine,” somebody was telling Iker, as he shook his head frantically because it was _not_ fucking _fine_. “It’s fine.”

* * *

Fernando Hierro would’ve been a remarkable sight anyway, but Fernando Hierro in pajamas standing on the lawn next to Pep Guardiola—in an old-fashioned dressing gown—while a guilty Xavi held out a first-aid kit was…was…weird.

Iker’s brain still wasn’t working too well. Mostly it was focused on how much he wanted to get away from the damned house. “What happened?”

“I told Cesc, because he wanted to know if he could stay over at my place tonight, and he called Pep who called Hierro,” Xavi said. He kept looking from Hierro to Iker and back as if he wasn’t sure who would be maddest at him.

“Can we just _leave_?” Victor snarled. Except his voice cracked at the end, and he flinched when Iker looked at him. He had three long scratches on his left cheek near the jawline, like somebody had gone at him with nails, and his hoodie was torn across the chest. He kept pushing Guardiola’s hands off when the man tried to look at the tears. “Why the hell are we still standing here?”

“We’re not,” Guardiola said crisply, interrupting Hierro. The next time Victor knocked his hand away, he grabbed Victor’s hand and held it firmly till Victor stopped cursing at him. “But first I need to make sure you’ll be all right till we get to the clinic. Understand?”

Victor looked like he wanted to bite off Guardiola’s face. He moved his arm like he might punch the man, and then he suddenly sagged, so that the hand Iker had out to block the blow ended up grabbing Victor’s shoulder to keep him on his feet. He sort of tried to shrug it off, but his head was hanging and he was mumbling in response to Xavi’s questions.

“Did you go into the room?” Hierro tapped Iker’s cheek till Iker looked back at him. “Iker. I need to know. Did you—”

“I—just my hand, but Victor went all the way in,” Iker said. He took his hand off Victor’s shoulder and then looked quickly back at the house. The muscles in his back had just seized up, like somebody had blown chilly air down his spine, and they were so damned close he could see the furniture through some of the windows. “There was this—this _thing_ , all black, and—”

“I didn’t see anything,” Victor muttered. He jerked at the disbelieving snort Iker couldn’t help making, but didn’t look up. “Just something yanking me.”

Hierro and Guardiola exchanged quick looks, and then Hierro put his hand on Victor’s shoulder. He waited for Victor to get through two tries at rolling it off, then stepped close enough so that the other man couldn’t ignore him. He had that look on his face, like he was sorry and he knew it was a bother, but he wasn’t going to move till he did what he needed to do.

“Did you go into the cupboard?” Hierro asked.

“What? What cupboard? I told you, _I didn’t see anything_.” Victor’s head went up for one moment, just long enough to give Hierro a wild stare, and then it dropped again.

“If it wasn’t right by the door, he couldn’t have. I got his hand and held onto it, and I never went over the threshold. But—but look, what the hell happened?” Iker wasn’t exactly calming down, but he was starting to string thoughts together again. But he still wanted to get the hell away from the place. Those dark windows were looking down on them like any moment—that thing would stare out of one. “What are you—you said it never goes downstairs. What the hell does that mean?”

Hierro shot Guardiola _another_ look, but Guardiola was too busy holding gauze to Victor’s bloody cheek to notice. Then he wasn’t, because the gauze was on the ground because Victor had twisted round towards the house. And actually got a step towards it before Iker grabbed him.

“What the _fuck_ —” And then the rest of Iker’s question was buffeted out of him by the hard arm Victor drove into his stomach. He wheezed but kept his hold on the other man as they flopped to the ground.

“Victor. Victor, stop—you can’t go back,” Xavi was saying. He maybe was trying to grab Victor’s hands. It was hard to see, what with the dark and Victor trying to hit every single one of them all at once. “You can’t go now, and anyway, what—”

“I left it!” Victor gasped. “In the—I left—I have to—”

Hierro came up behind Iker, who’d gone onto his back to try and get Victor’s feet off the ground. He bent down and took Victor’s wrists in his hands as casually as if he was picking up litter from the ground, and Iker could _feel_ how hard Victor was trying to fight it. Of course Hierro didn’t budge.

“Valdés,” Guardiola said, in a sharp hard tone Iker hadn’t heard from him before.

That finally did it. Victor gave one last wrench and then slumped on Iker. The back of his head smashed into Iker’s mouth, which—Iker tried not to eat it. Not easy when all Iker’s lungs wanted to do was suck in and dump out air as fast as possible, as often as possible, and no, it didn’t make him feel better to hear Victor breathing the same. If the jackass was any more trouble, Iker was just going to sock him and apologize to Xavi later.

“Where did you leave your things?” Hierro asked quietly. Oddly enough, he still didn’t look that mad.

“The break-room,” Iker answered, when it didn’t sound like Victor could. “Everything’s there except the flashlights—I think we dropped those.”

Hierro nodded, and with a short, efficient jerk, had Victor on his feet. Then he reached down and gave Iker a hand up. “Come by my office tomorrow morning and you can pick it all up. I’ll want to talk to you both anyway.”

“But for now, we’re going to the clinic,” Guardiola said firmly.

Iker glanced at Victor, but the other man was leaning on Xavi’s shoulder and still trying to catch his breath. Whatever the hell he’d been so anxious to get back, he didn’t seem to want it that badly now. “Okay. But what—”

“In the morning,” Hierro said, which settled it.

* * *

Not really, obviously. Hierro and Guardiola knew something and they were stonewalling about it, and anyway, that fucking _thing_. In the house.

“How’s your arm?” Xavi said. He held out a cup of coffee to Iker, then sat down next to Iker on the couch in the clinic waiting room.

“Not broken. Pretty bad bruise, though, and they said be careful with it, because another hit there might break it.” Iker put up his arm and looked at the wrap on it, then snorted and let his head fall back against the wall. He took a couple sips of coffee, then gave up; his appetite wasn’t really there and he didn’t think it’d be back any time tonight. Didn’t need the caffeine to be staying up, either. “I don’t know about that. Valdés whacked it a couple times when he was trying to go back in there…what the hell’s wrong with him, anyway?”

Xavi looked at Iker for a moment. Then he started to get up.

“No, wa—Xavi, come on. I’m freaked out. I didn’t—” Iker reached for the other man, realized he had coffee in that hand, and then remembered flexing his other hand made his swollen forearm hurt “—not like that. Just…why would he want to go back in? I don’t know what he told you, but what I saw—”

“He won’t _say_ anything,” Xavi said. He wavered for a few more seconds, then dropped back onto the couch with a sigh. He rubbed at his forehead, then pressed his face into his hands. Then he moved his hands down enough so he could talk, while staring at the floor. “Pep was trying to talk to him, to make sure he really was okay. But he just keeps saying he didn’t see anything, and he’s lying. I know he’s lying, but when I tried—okay, I love Victor, but he’s a fucking mean bastard when he wants to be. Sometimes you have to leave him alone.”

The obvious reply was there and waiting, but for once Iker didn’t feel like gloating. He just nodded.

“Hierro left, by the way.” Xavi looked as puzzled as Iker about it. “He said to tell you…he’d rather discuss this with you first before your parents, though if you want to talk to them, that’s fine.”

“Oh. Okay.” Iker shifted on the couch, then grimaced. He had some other bruises too that he hadn’t noticed before—probably from when they were running for their lives down the hall and crashing through anything in their way—and they were starting to stiffen up.

Xavi turned his coffee cup in his hands. Once or twice he started to ask Iker something, but he always gave up before Iker even got around to looking at him. Finally he sighed and put his hands on his knees. “Look, I don’t even know if I’m supposed to say sorry to you guys, or what for. Can you talk about it, either?”

“Honestly? I want to go home,” Iker said. Then he grimaced again. “Shit. I’m sorry, Xavi, you didn’t even…well…so…”

“I probably should wait for when we see Hierro,” Xavi said after a moment. He waved off Iker’s belated protests, finally cracking a wry grin. “No, no. I mean, I’m curious as fuck here, but I’m okay, aside from being worried for you guys. I can wait if it’s better for you.”

Iker nodded. He slouched down, then put the coffee down on the table by the couch and ran one hand over his face. Something touched his shoulder and he jumped, then breathed out slowly when he realized it was Xavi. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Well, anyway. You got your keys? If you don’t, you can crash at my place,” Xavi said.

“I…uh…” Good question. For a moment Iker wondered just how shittier his night was going to get. And then his fingers grazed his keys in his jeans-pocket, and thank God for small mercies. “No, I’ve got them.”

“Okay.” Xavi watched Iker get up, then stood himself. “So…Pep’s still around. He wanted to talk to me.”

Well, whatever, Guardiola was Xavi’s problem. Iker and Xavi made plans to meet up for breakfast, and then Xavi wandered back into the clinic while Iker headed out the front. Of course, once Iker was out on the step and staring at the shadowy campus before him, he realized it was a little more complicated than just Xavi’s problem. 

The thing was, Iker didn’t really want to walk home by himself.

It wasn’t that far, and he knew most of the streets he’d have to walk were lighted. It wasn’t even really that late. Where he lived, there would probably be people around. It wasn’t like he’d be alone. In fact, he still—Iker checked his pockets again and came up with his phone. He was so relieved he could’ve kissed the damn thing.

Something clinked and Iker nearly dropped the phone. He took a step back towards the clinic doors without thinking about it, and that moved the bush to his left so it wasn’t blocking Victor. Who was just standing there, staring at him. As if they hadn’t been scared shitless enough times already.

“Thanks for the warning,” Iker said.

Victor looked blank. The light from the clinic windows touched on the butterfly bandages stretched over his cheek, and the rusty-red scabs underneath them. Between his black hair and black hoodie, he was greyed out, like somebody had put him through a desaturation process.

Then his lip curled. He almost said something, but at the last minute chose to twist on his heel and give Iker his back as he started to walk off.

Well, good riddance, Iker thought. He turned himself and went up to the clinic doors, and had his hand on one to push it in. Then he took it back. Then he put it on again, and then he cursed and actually stomped his foot, because yeah, it was childish but the whole thing felt like something from when he was five and nobody ever let him do what he wanted to do. And when he maybe believed in things like ghosts, and when he didn’t ever feel fucking _bad_ about things he couldn’t control anyway. Goddamn it. He turned around and went after Victor.

The other man was walking fast, and had gotten to the road by the time Iker caught up to him. He didn’t look like he should be going like that—his pale face hadn’t just been a trick of the light—but he was healthy enough to slap out at Iker, as if Iker was some kind of pest he was trying to swat. “Go the fuck away,” he said. “I’ve spent all the time I want to spend with you lately.”

“Yeah, well, same here, but we’re going to have to talk to Hierro together tomorrow, so it’s not like you’re going to get away yet,” Iker retorted. He had to jog up a pace to get abreast of Victor again. “Listen—”

“The last time I listened to you, it got me dragged in there!” Victor swerved around a corner. It actually looked like he was throwing himself into a flowerbed, but at the last moment, he kept himself up and walking. “Fuck off, or I’ll break your head.”

Not that Iker thought of himself as particularly violent, but he was clenching and unclenching his fists already, and Victor was just lucky that they were walking too fast for Iker to think much about anything but keeping up. They were about the same height—Victor maybe had a few hairs on him—but personally knowing the dean hadn’t kept Iker from learning his way around a brawl. “I’d like to see you try.”

The other man whirled on Iker, who automatically jerked up his hands. Not quite into boxing form, but enough for Victor to get the idea. Weirdly, Victor stared at Iker’s hands like he’d not been talking about that at all. Then he looked at Iker’s face and the hostility came back. “Give me a break,” he said slowly, bitterly. “And get kicked out. Right.”

“Oh, for—I don’t fucking have Hierro on my shoulder all the time! Do you see him? Do you?” Iker threw out his arms, then pressed one hand to the side of his head. He was getting a headache on top of everything else.

“And so what? Even if he’s not around to see, and you don’t tell, like he’s going to let you come in tomorrow with a black eye and not ask about it.” A strand of hair fell into Victor’s eyes and he angrily rubbed it out of the way. When his hand had left his cheek, one of the butterfly bandages had come off, and the cut nearest his nose had reopened. “Why can’t you just— _go_?

“Because I _saw_ that fucking thing. And whatever, you’ve been saying you didn’t see it since we got out, but I don’t fucking care. All right? I don’t care what you say you saw or didn’t see. I know _I_ saw it. Jesus Christ.” Exhaling hurt all of a sudden, like Iker’s throat was lined with knives. He rubbed at his neck and accidentally banged his arm into his own shoulder, and goddamn it. It was all such a fucking cock-up and he didn’t even understand. “I can’t tell Hierro not to fuck around looking into things, okay? I mean—that’s so fucking obvious, isn’t it? If I was that big of a deal to him, I’d be able to tell him to go away. But he _doesn’t_. My whole life, him and Guardiola and—and I saw that thing. I saw it.”

Then Iker pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He breathed in, breathed out, and when he looked up, of course Victor wasn’t there. The asshole.

Nobody else was around either, and—and Iker really shouldn’t hear his breath so loudly. He wasn’t breathing that hard. He didn’t think he was, anyway. He was so fucking close to going crazy right now.

Iker turned slowly around, looking at the houses around him. Ones he’d walked by a million times, at all hours, and he’d been in some of them too. Slept in them, and had parties in them, and hadn’t seen any fucking weird things there. He just—he just had to do something.

He went a few steps one way, then came back. Then cursed and turned up the walk of the nearest building that had a lighted front door. Some apartment building, he wasn’t really paying attention, and once he got on the front step under the light, he just stood there like some kind of stalker. Stared at the doorbell. Remembered he had a phone. Maybe Fernando or Sergio was up. Or Cesc—that _shit_. It made Iker feel better to remember he was pissed off at someone.

Iker was getting out his phone when he heard something. His fingers went white around the phone, and then he heard the noise again, louder, and he knew it wasn’t some…thing. He put the phone away. Stared at the door some more. Then he sighed and went off the step, and turned right and looked behind the bush by the door.

Victor was sitting on the ground with his back to the wall and his knees pulled up. He sort of glanced at Iker as Iker crouched down, but mostly kept poking at his cheek with his fingers. “You’re smearing it all over,” Iker said after a moment.

“Fuck you.” But Victor pulled down his hand. He went to rub his fingers off against his hip, then stopped and looked at them instead. He bit his lip like he hadn’t really noticed it was actual blood. “Shit. _Shit_.”

Iker put his hand out and touched the wall between them when Victor looked at him. He kept his palm pressed there a second, then reached out and got Victor’s sleeve. “Look. Let’s just—”

“You really saw him?” Victor said, his voice quiet and cracking.

For a while Iker didn’t answer. It wasn’t that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, but…it was just one of those times where he knew something would happen right after, and he wasn’t really sure if he’d like it. He watched Victor shift nervously, pushing knees together and then sticking a hand between them, and then moved to let his head lean against the wall.

“I saw…this black thing. With an arm. And eyes, and—and these skinny fucking fingers, like they were just bones, but it was all black so I wasn’t sure.” Iker realized he was crimping the fold of Victor’s sleeve between his fingers, but couldn’t quite make himself stop. “Then the door closed. I didn’t see if it was a—”

“It was a man.” Victor’s arm moved. Towards Iker. Then they nearly knocked heads, because Victor started crawling out before Iker could move out of the way. “I’m getting out.”

Iker bit back the ‘now you tell me’ and just scooted his ass along the step. Then he stood up, once he realized Victor wasn’t just relocating his break-down. He let Victor climb shakily to his feet and then they stood around, fidgeting.

“You want to come up?” Victor abruptly asked. He jerked his head at the door, then looked amused at Iker’s confusion. Then sort of hysterical as he brought his hand around to show a key-ring in it, which jangled violently as he tried and failed to pick out one key. “I live here.”

“Oh,” Iker said. He shrugged, then pushed at the knots in his neck. “Okay.”

* * *

It took a while for Victor to get the keys to work, but he didn’t look like he wanted help and Iker didn’t really want to offer it. Eventually they got in, and went up to a flat on the third floor. Heavy metal poster on the wall, _Sons of Anarchy_ box-set with half the DVDs out of the case, but the couch was blue and the kitchen had flowered curtains. And it was a lot cleaner than Iker’s place, admittedly.

Victor went into the kitchen as soon as he had the door open, leaving Iker to shut and lock that. And he didn’t come back, so after some half-hearted poking around, Iker followed the other man and found him trying to make coffee.

“Maybe you should clean your face first,” Iker said. When Victor shot him a dirty look, he pointed at the bloodstains on the filter. “Do you have a first-aid kit or…”

“They gave me spares,” Victor muttered. He rummaged around in his pockets, then abruptly yanked his hoodie off, tossed it on the counter and dug back into it.

He came up with a small thin packet and then stopped when he saw Iker looking at his chest. Nothing had been under the hoodie, except for four long scratches that ran from just over Victor’s left nipple—lucky that that hadn’t gotten caught—diagonally down to his right hip. They glistened with that skin-glue stuff, which just made it look nastier.

“You should probably wash the cut first before you put on another one. So…” Iker looked away, feeling like he’d just screwed up for some reason, and spotted a roll of paper towels. He tore off one and got it wet under the sink faucet, then turned around. He was going just hand it over, but Victor had moved up and they were sort of in each other’s face, more or less.

Victor didn’t look like he’d planned it, more like he’d moved again and assumed Iker had eyes in the back of his head. Which Iker didn’t, but usually he was better at knowing where people were, and okay, they were both fucking rattled. But this awkward silence thing had to go.

“What happened?” Iker asked.

“I don’t know.” Victor edged back a little. He had his hand on the kitchen counter, wrapped over into the sink, and his knuckles had whitened. If he wanted to move any further back, he needed to let go, but he didn’t look like he could do that. “I felt…like an arm, around me, and that’s where this…” he gestured at the cuts on his chest “…and then I turned around, but you had my wrist so I couldn’t really get all the way around. And it was mostly behind me, so I couldn’t really see it.”

Iker opened his mouth, then hesitated.

“Because I _heard_ him,” Victor said. He looked down between them. His shoulders were starting to shake, and Iker could hear his nails scraping at the metal of the sink. “He was saying—in my ear—it was a man’s voice, and he kept saying, ‘you came back, you came back, now I’m going to kill you.’”

“Oh.” And then Iker felt like he should say something else, except what the hell was he supposed to say? Something was dripping from his hand; he looked down and pried his fingers from around the sodden paper towel.

Victor stayed where he was, hunched over and breathing in that uneven, short way people did when they were trying their damnedest to control themselves and still weren’t managing it. Then he let out a long, low breath, and was completely silent. The seconds stretched out.

Just when Iker was going to shake him, to make sure he hadn’t gone and fucking died, Victor inhaled sharply. He drummed his fingers against the sink and looked to the side, then straightened up. Maybe he was going back to the coffee. Anyway, Iker grabbed his arm and he stopped and looked up. “I’m sorry,” Iker said. “It was a stupid idea.”

For a moment Victor stared at Iker, completely not understanding. Then his mouth moved. Iker thought the man was going to flip out and moved his hand to Victor’s shoulder, and Victor giggled at him. This little high shaky noise.

“Yeah.” Victor snorted a few times. “Yeah, kind of.”

“I didn’t—I didn’t, you know, _know_.” And now Iker was irritated. He wasn’t sure whether it was with Victor or with himself, or with whatever fucking asshole thought making ghosts real was a good thing. But whatever it was, he didn’t really want to take it out on Victor, so he just dabbed the towel at Victor’s cheek as a distraction. He didn’t think about it.

Victor hissed, then held himself as stiff as a board while Iker mopped the blood off his face. He didn’t really look like he was thinking about what Iker was doing either; the flicker of amusement, even if it’d been also close to panic, had quickly vanished and he’d sunk back into himself again. When Iker dropped the bloody towel in the sink, he started and then held up the packet of butterfly bandages like he’d forgotten what they were.

Iker took it and tore it open, and was pasting the first one over the cut when Victor touched his side. “So why’d you grab me?” Victor asked.

After a long moment, Iker made himself run his thumb over the end of the bandage to make it stay. Then he leaned back and stared at Victor. “Because some goddamn crazy thing grabbed _you_ , and what kind of fucking person do you think I am, anyway?”

“Look, I don’t really know you, all right?” Victor snapped.

Iker started with one response, then stopped. He chewed on his lip, then let his hand rise and fall. “Why would you think that about people you don’t know?”

“Because—” Then Victor turned away. He was thinking about walking off, but suddenly he put his hands back and grabbed the counter, pushing himself up against it. Hard enough so that he pushed himself off his feet for a moment, and then he let himself down with a pained grunt. He stared at the floor. “I don’t know. I…look, it’s not because I have some awful family, all right? Everyone always goes there first. My family’s great.” His voice dropped. “I mean, they put up with me.”

“Okay, so you’re fucked-up,” Iker said, watching Victor’s head come up. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to let some fucking nightmare kill you.”

Victor blinked a few times. His hand sneaked up and pushed into his hair, then got stuck there or something as he looked at Iker.

“So now you know that about me. I don’t let anyone get dragged off by ghosts,” Iker added.

“And you’re kind of a jackass, even when you’re being nice,” Victor said. Then he winced. He started to say more, stopped himself and hunched his shoulders. “I…”

“Yeah.” Iker paused, then let his shoulders drop as he looked up at the ceiling. “I know that, you know. Kind of hard for me not to, when half the fucking professors here have been telling me so since I could walk. I…I don’t know, if I stop, it’s like I’m the suck-up everybody thinks. If I do it, I’m, well, a jackass.”

A shuffling noise made Iker look back down: Victor, away from the counter and messing around with the coffee-maker again. “You want some?” He knocked the bloody filter aside and pulled out a fresh one. “There are mugs in the—”

“Can I have your couch?” Iker asked. He sounded like a priss and made a face at himself. “It’s just…I could go home and call somebody, but then I’ve got to explain. Xavi’s talking to Guardiola, probably saving our asses.”

“Yeah. I’ll get you a blanket soon as I get this started,” Victor said, not turning around. He measured out grinds into the filter. “Can you honestly _sleep_ , though?”

Iker shrugged and leaned against the counter. “Maybe I’ll just sit up.”

“You want to watch something?” Victor did look at Iker then, not so much nervous as wondering if Iker could tell them what the hell was going on now. “A movie?”

“Do you have anything that’s not going to make me think about it?”

* * *

They put on a romcom. It took five stuttering, blushing minutes for Victor to explain why the hell he had that around, because he wouldn’t look at Iker long enough for Iker to say he’d taken the same stupid class and the professor always pulled shit like that halfway through term. Anyway, it had a lame plot and way too many shopping scenes, and the cinematography was basically medium angle, close-up, close-up, wide angle, repeat. It was about the only thing they could’ve watched right then.

Victor had pulled on a buttondown—charcoal grey, but so worn-looking Iker would have bet Real’s goalkeeper it had started life as black—because the doctors had told him to try and not rub off the skin-glue. So he’d done up half the buttons and let the rest flap around, and when he was dozing off by Iker like he currently was, it gaped so that Iker could look straight down the length of those scratches. He’d rolled up the sleeves, too, and now Iker saw the bruises on Victor’s wrist where he’d grabbed it.

That just wasn’t normal. Iker was alive and that thing wasn’t, but they’d both managed to hurt the man. Granted, Iker had been trying to save him, and a couple bruises weren’t bad compared to…Iker didn’t want to think about what wouldn’t happened if he hadn’t been able to hold on. And fine, it wasn’t like he knew anything about ghosts either, but once death happened, that was supposed to be that. If a dead thing could actually do something to a living thing, that just defied the definition of dead.

And Hierro knew something, and he had better tell Iker what it was in the morning. He could be as mad as he wanted that Iker hadn’t listened to him, but who the hell was going to pay much attention to some vague warning? And also, why hadn’t he just told Iker the truth? It wasn’t like him to hold back.

It all just was fucked up, any way Iker looked at it. He snorted irritably to himself, then looked over, feeling some movement. But Victor just nuzzled his head further into the couch back, somehow asleep despite three cups of coffee and one fucking awful experience. Lucky bastard.

Iker slumped down and stared at the TV. Then he put his head back on the couch and squeezed his eyes shut. He was drop-dead bone-aching tired, and every bit of his body wanted to go to sleep except for his brain. Because that fucking thing. So he couldn’t go to sleep.

He lifted his head and opened his eyes, and a good minute went by with him staring at the TV before he noticed something funny. The color palette of the film had gone from bright pop colors to dark tones—he could’ve sworn the actresses had been about to go shopping in some mall before he’d closed his eyes, and now they were walking down a hall with the lights off. Actually, it was just one person, and—and Iker started bolt-upright. His back spasmed and the skin on his hands and face felt clammy, and what the _hell_ was going on?

That was the hall from the house. And the person walking down it was—it looked like a man from the back. Wearing old-fashioned clothes. He was going to the door. He was standing in front of it, so Iker couldn’t see his hands, but the door was op—

—Iker’s arm shot out to the side. He was not fucking seeing this, he was thinking. He wasn’t and Victor had better tell him so. And then Iker’s hand touched something so _cold_ that he knew right away it wasn’t Victor. And he wanted to let go and not look and Jesus Christ, he was turning and looking and it was an awful, awful face.

“Casillas! Goddamn it!”

The voice was from miles away. Then all of a sudden it was right in Iker’s ear and he was breathing like he’d just run a marathon, staring up into Victor’s face.

It was the other man. The cuts were there, with the one butterfly bandage that was crooked because Iker hadn’t decided to become a doctor, and to seal it, Victor gave Iker a shake right after Iker muttered that he was awake. Iker pushed the other man off, took a deep breath, and looked around. He went to push his hand through his hair and found that his arm up to the elbow was shaking uncontrollably.

To his credit, Victor didn’t ask any stupid questions. He looked a little grumpy about being shoved away, but after a moment’s irritation, he just sat on his coffee table and started to fidget with his…he wasn’t the same. His hair was wet, and he was wearing a different shirt, and sunlight was coming through the window behind him.

“You were going to fall off there, I thought,” he finally said. His hand twitched towards the couch. He glanced at Iker, then turned awkwardly and stared at the TV, which was off now. “You looked all right when I got up.”

“Well, I had a nightmare after that.” Iker shifted, then grimaced at the various twinges and tweaks that brought up in his cramped limbs. His mouth tasted like shit too, and he needed a piss. “Can I—”

Victor just pointed. After a moment, Iker got up and went into the bathroom. He started to close the door, then stopped as something flickered across the mirror. It was just his reflection and him moving too fast, but…he lifted his head and listened to Victor moving around on the other side of the flat. Then he pushed the door half-shut, and stood over the toilet so that one, he couldn’t see in the mirror and two, he could see anyone coming towards the bathroom.

That taken care of, he appropriated some of Victor’s mouthwash and then scrubbed his face and neck with soap in the sink. His clothes smelled a bit off too, all musty like…like…he cut off that train of thought and pulled off his shirt, flapped it a bit to try and air it out, and then threw it over his shoulder as he walked out of the bathroom.

Outside it smelled like fresh-brewed coffee, and when Iker went into the kitchen, a full mug was sitting on the counter. Victor was leaning against the opposite counter, sipping his own coffee and nibbling at a piece of toast. He didn’t look up when Iker picked up the mug, but did when Iker thanked him.

“Was it about—”

“Yeah,” Iker said. He moved the cup under his mouth, decided it was a little too hot, and lowered it. “I saw that hall again, and the door. And somebody there. But it wasn’t the one who grabbed you.”

Victor’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “How do you know?”

“He was shorter.” Iker stared into his coffee. “And he was on the other side of the door. Where we were. He was trying to go in, not get out.”

It was quiet. Then, still very quietly, Victor ate his toast. He put his empty mug in the sink and bent down to splash some water over the crumbs on his mouth, then stood up. At first he almost turned towards Iker, and then he didn’t. Then he did, but he was looking at a point on the counter behind Iker. “This is really fucked up.”

Iker almost hurt himself snorting. He choked down the coffee in his mouth, then broke into the first laugh as he tried to wipe at the drops that had dribbled past his lips. He was very aware that Victor was staring at him like he’d lost his mind, but he had to put down his cup on the counter, he was laughing so hard. Then he grabbed at his knees and felt hands pulling at his shoulders, and he realized he was gasping.

“Don’t— _don’t_ freak out,” Victor was hissing. “Stop it. Stop it!”

He jerked up on Iker’s shoulders and suddenly the gasps ran out. So did Iker’s resistance—he went up, nearly cracked his head on the underside of Victor’s chin, and then collapsed back against the counter. He blinked when Victor touched his cheek; it was a fluttering, twitching sort of touch, and Victor didn’t look like he entirely knew he had done it.

“I’m okay,” Iker finally said. He sounded raspy. He grimaced, made himself swallow, and tried again. “I’m okay.”

Victor looked at him.

“Fine, I’m not, but…I think I’m working, at least. Okay.” Iker took a deep, slow breath, then looked back at Victor. “I’m really, really sorry.”

For a moment Victor blinked and frowned at Iker. The man’s hands were still on Iker’s shoulders, but then he apparently noticed and he took them off and shoved one into his hair while the other rubbed absently against his hip. “It’s not like you knew. Even if…even if you do believe in ghosts, who would believe they’re like that?”

“Thanks,” Iker said after a moment. He scratched behind his left ear, then pushed at the side of his neck. “And thanks for letting me stay over.”

Victor blinked again, then shrugged. “Not a big deal.”

“With how I’ve been around you?” Then Iker sighed and nodded. “Yeah, okay, I have been an asshole. Sorry about that too.”

“Well, if you’re going to drag me away from psychotic ghosts, I think I can let you fall asleep on my couch,” Victor said, a wry smile glancing over his face. Then he snorted at something else. He noticed Iker’s inquiring stare and…kind of blushed. “Uh, it—I just—well, I just remembered, when Xavi was talking me into meeting you, he said we had so much in common, we shouldn’t even need a beer to hit it off.”

And Iker could see where that was going. Enough hostility to drive _Xavi_ up the wall, and it took a goddamned night from hell to finally get them over it. “Some first date. I like to think I do better.”

“You like to think you do a lot of things,” Victor observed. That smile was teasing at his mouth again. “It’s not like you even got a goodnight kiss out of it.”

That came out—not _wrong_ , but not like the easy joke Victor probably meant it to be. Iker couldn’t really put his finger on it exactly, because they were both still one step from hysteria, but it was morning, not last night. And they were both still talking, if not as comfortable with reality as they’d been yesterday morning, and Victor was staring at Iker with wide eyes that weren’t really crazy so much as—nervous as hell. Because he was wondering, too, and his mouth was a little open so when Iker put his hands on the other man’s sides, his breath came in a tiny puff onto Iker’s face. And then Iker kissed him, and his mouth stiffened shut.

Iker hesitated and Victor suddenly pushed in, and then Iker had his hands glued to Victor’s hips and Victor was sort of grabbing haphazardly at Iker’s back from shoulders to waist, and Victor’s mouth was open now. Open and hot and he _licked_ at Iker’s mouth, just swerved his tongue over Iker’s lip, and Iker would have cursed—not meaning it, because it was like Victor had set Iker’s mouth on fire and he _liked_ that—if he hadn’t been busy digging his fingers into Victor’s hips, trying to drag the man closer. His hands scrabbled down Victor’s jeans, clumsily found out how to make the curve of the man’s ass work in his favor, and then pulled hard forward.

Victor’s hand slapped against the counter behind them. He and Iker chased tongues back and forth while he leaned on that arm, while his other hand clawed up Iker’s front to hook over Iker’s shoulder. The ball of his thumb prodded into the bottom of Iker’s jaw, trying to make it turn, and Victor was sucking at the side of Iker’s mouth like it might be worth it.

The door buzzed. They both started, and Iker felt the catch of the raised scab even before Victor flinched. “Fuck,” Iker mumbled, trying to get away from the cuts on Victor’s chest. “Fuck, fuck, is it—”

Something flopped between them. Victor grabbed it and pushed it against the right side of his stomach, and then they realized it was Iker’s shirt. For a moment Victor looked like he hated himself, and like he was going to toss the shirt at Iker.

That damn buzzer came again. “Goddamn fucking—” Iker pushed his way out from between Victor and the counter, loped over to the intercom, and pushed the speaker button. “Go the fuck away.”

*…Iker?* said Pepe. Then his voice got fainter, like he was moving away. *Sounded like him, right? But that’s what Victor says.*

“Move over.” Having decided to keep Iker’s shirt, Victor pushed at Iker’s shoulder till he could reach the intercom. “Reina? What are you doing here?”

*Well, that’s definitely him. Victor! Hey, you left your bike at the bar—*

Victor’s eyes bloomed. Then he cursed fervently, letting his head thump into the wall.

*So I brought it over, and Xavi’s here too.* Pause to confer in mutters. *He’s…uh, he says to say he’s got spare clothes for Iker. So…you want to let us up, or should we just…leave things on the step and come back later?*

“Oh, Christ,” Iker said. He—this was so—

—so stupid next to fucking _real_ ghosts. Reina could shove it, and Xavi…Xavi was kind of scary too sometimes, but Iker could really use some clothes that didn’t smell like that damn place. He buzzed them in.

* * *

By the time they got up to Victor’s door, Iniesta had joined them. It’d only been about a minute, but Victor had spent that sixty seconds walking around in a tiny circle and muttering to himself while yanking at his hair and ignoring Iker’s questions. So yeah, Iker was okay with Iniesta immediately dragging Victor off and asking if he was all right. He took the change of clothes Xavi had brought and ducked into the bathroom with them.

Reina went…somewhere. Xavi stood on the other side of the door and did his best impression of not knowing that Iniesta was being weirdly forceful and Victor was not looking in Iker’s direction even more than usual. “I called Sergio, because I was wondering if you’d gotten home all right,” he said. “Actually, I’ve been thinking all night I should’ve waited to talk to Pep and gone with you.”

“’s okay.” Iker pulled the fresh shirt over his head and down his torso, then grimaced as the back flipped under. He crooked one arm up to yank it free. “I…ran into Victor outside of the clinic. He seemed pretty freaked, so I came with him, and it was so late he said I could stay over.”

“Oh. So you didn’t ever go home.” Xavi’s voice caught awkwardly.

For a moment Iker stood and stared off into space. Then he sighed and shook his head. He scooped up his old clothes from the toilet tank, then pushed open the door and found Xavi blinking at him. “No, I didn’t go home. I stayed over, and Victor and I are still in one piece, and it was all very civil. Which proves we can get along.”

“What happened?” Reina wandered in from the hall, then frowned as Xavi jumped. “I thought you didn’t go into the house.”

“I didn’t.” Xavi glanced at something behind Reina, then turned back to Iker. He opened and closed his mouth, then rubbed at his right eye. “Iker, I didn’t—”

“Shit. Sorry.” Iker absently stuffed his clothes into a ball, and the ball under his arm. “Look, I didn’t mean to snap on you just now. I didn’t sleep much last night.”

Iniesta’s head peeped in, then disappeared. Then Victor walked up by Reina, scruffing his hair and looking defensive. “Nothing happened,” he said sharply. “We’re fine. I let him stay over. It’s not a big deal.”

Reina, that amused bastard, had folded his arms over his chest and was leaning against the wall, looking back and forth between Iker and Victor like he knew something. Victor had the sense to glower at him, but Reina just grinned back. “Ah, what a lovely sight, the two of you.”

A hot red flush started in Victor’s face. He took one and a half steps towards Reina, then jerked to a stop; Iniesta’s elbow poked out from behind him. “Look, this is not fucking _funny_ —”

“I didn’t say it was!” Reina protested. “I’m just enjoying the sight of you morons finally recognizing that—”

“Nothing happened!” Victor snarled.

“And why the hell you think something would just because I stayed over is beyond me,” Iker added. He turned to flick off the bathroom light, and when he turned back, he thought he saw Victor looking at him. But by the time he lifted his head, Victor was having a low, annoyed conversation with Iniesta. “Yeah, we’ve fought a lot, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a sense of decency, Pepe. Last night was fucking awful for everyone. Like I’m going to make it worse.”

Well, that definitely was Victor looking at him now. Staring at him, with an odd expression that Iker would’ve needed more than a moment to fully untangle. It was offended and confused and something else, but what that was…

“I wasn’t,” Xavi started, with enough frustration to distract Iker. “I wasn’t trying to say that, damn it. I was just surprised because when I called Sergio, he said he’d heard you come in.”

They all stared at him. Even Reina. Then Iker lifted his hand. He was going to rub at his temple, but something shifting under his arm made him stop. And look down and think. “But then—”

“So this morning I went there first and let myself in, but you weren’t around, and your bed didn’t look like you’d slept in it,” Xavi added. The exasperation was starting to bleed out of his voice, and when he looked up at Iker, he shivered a little. Xavi never got that nervous, not even at exams. “I checked with Sergio again, he said he’d heard your door open and close, but…so I called Joaquín because I remembered he’d been at the clinic desk last night and he said he’d seen you go with Victor from the clinic. So I came here.”

“Man, a burglar on top of everything,” Pepe said after a long moment.

Xavi shook his head, which Iker took to mean nothing had looked out of place. And Xavi had been over to Iker’s enough times to know, and Jesus fucking Christ.

“Maybe…” Iniesta looked like he wanted to slide back behind Victor when they all turned to him “…maybe Ramos heard somebody else? Going into the next one over?”

Not likely. The doors were in pairs, and Sergio’s hearing generally wasn’t good enough to hear Iker shouting at him to look out for the oncoming campus security, let alone a door from another pair. Which…

Iker made himself move a little: he jiggled his foot. It was enough to get him going again. He looked at his watch, then hissed. “Shit, we have to hurry.”

* * *

Reina peeled off outside of Victor’s flat, but Iniesta came with them all the way to the house. He was unusually talkative, which made sense when Victor froze up at the corner and just stared at the place.

Iker stopped as well, half-listening to Xavi and Iniesta’s efforts to get a monosyllabic Victor to tell them whether he was okay because, well, he knew the full answer to that one. He looked at the house, and since it was daytime it…it didn’t creep him out, exactly. It certainly wasn’t as eerie as it was at night, and though his memories tried to show him what that had been like, they were—different. The whole feeling was just different, so remembering his fear wasn’t nearly as bad as when he’d actually been afraid. But there was something still wrong about it all, something that was nagging at him. It was like the problem wasn’t what he remembered about last night, but like he’d _forgotten_ something.

“Do we really have to go all the way there?” Iniesta was asking. 

After a moment, Iker realized the man was asking him. He glanced over—Victor was staring at him with a mixture of hostility and pleading—then looked back at the house. Then he spotted somebody on the steps and an icy shudder went through him. He was _afraid_ again.

Then he saw it was Hierro. He breathed out, blinked and gave himself a shake. “I’ll go ask,” he said.

He was halfway up the walk before he heard steps behind him. Which really should’ve been creepier than just seeing a figure on the steps, but Iker almost knew before he had his arm yanked who it was. “You fucking bastard,” Victor muttered.

“I was going to ask for you.” Iker pulled his arm away—good thing it wasn’t his bruised one—then looked over his shoulder to see Iniesta and Xavi following, both looking uncertain about it. Then he took a closer look at Victor. “Are you all right?”

For an answer, Victor hunched his shoulders and stared pointedly at the sidewalk in front of them. They didn’t have time for Iker to pry the man out of his new sulk, so they just came up to the steps. 

Hierro had been leaning against the railing, but he stood back from it and came down the steps to give Iker a hug. Then he did the same to Victor, who still looked like he didn’t know what to make of it after Hierro had let him go. “All right,” Hierro said, turning to Iker. “Tell me.”

Iker had in fact spent some time thinking about exactly that. Not planning his lies so much as making sure he thought of all the points he’d need to raise, because hey, journalist in training. Every story had more than one angle. But Hierro wasn’t mad like he’d been expecting, or even looking irritated. Instead he just looked worried and grave, with bags under his eyes like he’d been up all night too, and Iker just…told him.

“And then we ran into you,” he finished. He was staring at Hierro’s shoes by then; it always irritated the hell out of him how Hierro made him feel like a naughty little kid again, but right then he could only work up a half-hearted sigh. Mostly he felt angry at himself, for doing something where Hierro wasn’t even disappointed with him. It would’ve been easier if Hierro was mad. “I know I didn’t listen to you, but I didn’t think the stories were—”

“None of us did,” Xavi put in. “I didn’t think that anything serious would happen, or else I wouldn’t have gone along with it. If there’s any punishment, it shouldn’t just be for Iker.”

Hierro snorted. “No, there’ll be no punishment.” He offered Iker a half-smile when Iker looked up. “I think last night was enough. But I wanted to hear what you had to say, and I wanted to show you something.”

“Inside?” Iker said sharply. “I—look, I—we’re listening _now_. We don’t need to see—”

“What is it?” Victor asked roughly. He had his fists pressed into his legs when Iker looked at him.

For a long moment, Hierro looked at him. Then, without a word, Hierro turned around and waved at them to follow.

He took them up to the room, of course. The door was locked again, and for some reason Iker noticed that Hierro had to fight with the lock a bit to get it open; it apparently hadn’t been oiled for a while. Then Hierro pushed the door in and walked into the room while they all stood in the hall. Iniesta told Victor very quietly that it was all right, while a foot prodded at Iker’s calf. But Xavi wasn’t being a nag for once.

It was a smallish room. Not much was in it. The windows didn’t have curtains, and the floor had been stripped to the bare boards. Some chairs and two desks were pushed up against one wall, and then there was a large cupboard against the other wall. That was where Hierro had gone. He went briskly up to it, unlocked the padlock on it—with a stifled curse at the stiff workings—and swung open the doors so quickly Iker didn’t have time to hold his breath.

The inside was empty. It was divided in two halves, both just about large enough for a man, though one side had pegs like it had used to have shelves. Then Hierro closed up the cupboard, locked it, and came out of the room. He locked that too and took them back out to the steps.

“That was where they found him,” Hierro said.

“You’ve seen him.” Iker felt his voice stick a little and cleared his throat. His chin dropped and he made it lift again, looking Hierro in the eye. “You have. That’s why you—”

“It was one of the worst nights of my life and I see no reason for anyone to repeat it,” Hierro said crisply. Something shifted in him, and suddenly the worry was gone and in its place was an iron-stern, piercing stare that would accept no discussion. “I believe this is over now.”

* * *

“Of course it’s not over!” Iker said, dropping his bags on the floor. After Iker had given back the keys to the house, Hierro had given them their things back and let them go. Victor and Iniesta had promptly left, but Xavi had stayed to walk Iker back to his place. Where everything did look normal, and it didn’t feel weird, and Iker was not so fucking stupid that he’d take that to mean things were actually fine. “He knows more than the story he told me. And he’s not going to tell me that, even though—”

Xavi sat down on the couch. “Iker. Did you see the scratches on Victor’s face?”

“Yes.” Iker paused. Then he bent down, unzipped his backpack and started taking out things. “Yeah, and that’s the goddamn point, Xavi. Whatever it is, it’s bad enough to do something like that. I really don’t think that just locking everything up and making people stay away is going to keep it down.”

“And I’m not saying it isn’t. Really, Iker,” Xavi replied in a soothing tone. “But I just don’t think it’s a great idea to fight Hierro on this one. Like you said, it’s fucking nasty enough by itself. You want to add Hierro to that?”

“I want to do whatever I have to do to get rid of it. That kind of thing, you shouldn’t have to put up with it. You should just figure out how to make it go,” Iker muttered.

Xavi was quiet for a few moments, letting Iker move around putting things away. Then he got up and came over to stand while Iker squatted on the floor, trying to sort out notebooks. “Don’t you think Hierro would have tried that?”

“Well, if he did, he’s not telling me, and we’re back to the beginning again.” Iker tossed aside one notebook, then rocked back on his heels and looked up at Xavi. “This isn’t some kind of pride thing, all right?”

“Did something else happen?” Xavi asked after a moment.

“You mean, besides somebody maybe breaking into my place just so Sergio could tell you on the same night?” Then Iker sighed and looked down. He rested one arm on his knee and ran his other hand over the top of his head, then pulled at the back of his neck a few times. Then he put that hand down on the floor. “I don’t…maybe. I’m not trying to be some crazy hero, Xavi. But it was my idea, and none of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t thought of going there, and I just…I want to know that it’ll be okay now.”

For a moment he thought Xavi got it. The other man shoved his hands in his pockets and nodded slowly, and really looked like he understood what Iker was saying. “But why can’t you just try talking to Hierro again? I’m not saying you can’t do something else too, but try him first.”

Occasionally Iker and Xavi had arguments where it was clear they never were going to agree. It was a sign of how good their friendship was that they could usually acknowledge the difference in opinion, respect that it wasn’t likely to change in the near future, and just move on, no grudges. Usually. When Xavi walked out the door, he was telling Iker he’d come over for dinner to figure out what the hell to do about their assignment now, but he also sounded like he wanted to kick something. And Iker felt pretty much the same.

It wouldn’t last, but sometimes Iker just—wished Xavi would get that he knew Hierro and he knew when it was pointless to ask the man, and this was one of those times. Hierro meant well, and so did Xavi, and Iker _knew_ that. But all that meaning well wasn’t actually going to get the job done, and _that_ was pretty fucking annoying. And Iker wasn’t being a jerk about it. Really. He just felt that way and it wasn’t like he could help what he felt.

Iker stared at the backpack in his hand, then sighed and threw it on the couch as he went for the door. It hadn’t been that long and if he hurried, he could probably catch Xavi at the—Victor in his doorway. Blinking and looking like he didn’t know what he was doing there either.

“Why are you here?” Iker asked. Then he shook his head and tried to push past the other man. “Never mind, look, I’m sorry but—”

“If you’re looking for Xavi, he just got in a car with Cesc,” Victor said.

Iker went one more step, then stopped. He swore and sort of flapped his arms stupidly around, and then went back to his door. Then he swore again. “Swear to God, next time I see Fàbregas, I’m going to kill that interfering shit. How many times has that been?”

Victor didn’t answer that one, but just stood in place and picked at his cheek. Once he made a slight movement towards Iker, like he was going to grab Iker’s arm, but when Iker looked at him, he stiffened.

“Well,” Iker finally said. Then he tensed. “You didn’t—nothing else—”

“No,” Victor snapped. He pressed his lips together, looked away, then looked back at Iker. He kept pushing his one hand against his hip. “I…well…thanks for…for not mentioning anything to Pepe.”

Iker blinked. Then he turned back to his flat, not really hiding his eyeroll. “Oh. Yeah, well, I didn’t want to see you freak out again, and sometimes Pepe’s sense of humor is crap.”

“I wasn’t the only one freaking out,” Victor threw at Iker’s back.

After a moment, Iker twisted around. “Look, I don’t know what the problem is now, but I wasn’t trying to be an asshole to you. I was trying to help. It’s not like I would’ve minded Pepe knowing except that he was obviously going to make a joke out of it, and I didn’t like that.”

“Are you kidding me?” Victor’s brows rose nearly to his hairline. “You wouldn’t mind them knowing.”

“That we made out? That I was scared out of my mind by something in that house? Something else?” Exasperated, Iker threw up his hands. “I’m not fucking embarrassed that I kissed you. It happened, I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. But I was already freaked out, I think everybody in there knew it so it wasn’t like it had to be said, and I didn’t need you to flip out again and—”

“Why would _I_ flip out?” Victor asked.

Iker stared at him for a moment. “What are you doing right now?”

“I’m not flipping out!” Then Victor took a step back. He pressed his hands to his face and took a deep breath before he looked at Iker again. It didn’t help too much, but at least he wasn’t looking like he was going to run. Still looked like he might hit Iker, though. “I’m just—look, I came over to ask if you’re really going to leave things alone. The ghosts, I mean.”

The change of subject took a second to get through to Iker. Then he frowned and shook his head. “No. And I don’t give a shit what you think. You don’t have to get involved anymore, but things happened after we left, and I’m not going to stop till they stop.”

“I wasn’t saying you should stop,” Victor said irritably.

He and Iker looked at each other, while the anger slowly drained out of Victor’s eyes and stance. The other man started to fidget, raising one hand towards his cheek; Iker instinctively reached out to knock it away and Victor flinched. He shoved his hand down and looked to the side, then reluctantly turned back to Iker.

“I want to know what’s really going on, too,” Victor said, more quietly. He shivered a little, then grimaced and stared at a point beyond Iker’s left shoulder. “I don’t want to go back there, ever. But—but I’ll do it if that’s what it takes. Or anything else. Or else I can’t sleep.”

“Okay.” Iker leaned against the jamb, then stepped back into his flat. “Okay. I…honestly do not think Hierro’s going to help. I know him. But there’s another place I want to try—you know Xavi doesn’t agree?”

Victor didn’t look terribly surprised to hear that, but he didn’t look put-off by the news either, just giving a shrug as he followed Iker inside. “Also, I didn’t fucking kiss you back because I was freaking out. I’m not that damaged, and you’re not my fucking savior.”

Right. Iker had to stare at him again. “And when the hell did I say I was? I just kissed you, okay?”

“Okay,” Victor muttered. He stopped just inside the door, holding himself so that he somehow managed to look a few centimeters shorter than Iker.

“Just give me a moment to get some things,” Iker said. He got his backpack and one of his notebooks, and then began to look around for his camera. “So you’d go back in? Because I’m having a hard time telling. Last night you tried—”

“Because I was fucking insane and wasn’t thinking right, and I remembered my camera was in there, and look, it just…” Victor slumped back against the wall, then pushed the heel of his hand against his forehead. He mumbled to himself before looking tiredly back at Iker. “I can’t lose that one. You have no idea what I had to do to pay for it, and they won’t let me check out any of the university’s.”

The camera was hidden under a pile of junk mail, which Iker really needed to get around to throwing away. He slid that into his backpack and then came back to the door. Then he kind of stood there and was awkward while trying to think of something to say. Because yeah, he’d given Victor a lot of shit about that, but now, looking at the way the man’s shoulders were sloped and the self-disgust in Victor’s eyes, he…was an asshole at times, he knew that. Nothing new there. “Well, we don’t know that we’ve got to go back in. First, I think we’d better find out the real story behind the whole thing.”

“Where are we going?” Victor asked.

“To somebody who _will_ talk to me, and who’s not going to tell Hierro.” Iker went out into the hall, then waited for Victor. “They do exist, and luckily, I know how to find them.”

* * *

Fernando Morientes, dressed in nothing but a damp towel slung around his waist, let them in and then gave Iker a hug that left Iker smelling of the man’s shampoo. “Sorry about this,” he said afterward. “I had to wait for them to deliver the new fridge and got in my run late today.”

Iker was more interested in seeing the inside of Raúl’s kitchen anyway—he hadn’t been by in a while, and Raúl had gotten a space-age-looking microwave too—but he was reminded about Mori’s effect on people when he saw Victor staring at the man. He poked Victor in the side, then grinned at Victor’s half-distracted, half-irritated look. “Hey, even professors need showers.”

“You’re a prick,” was Victor’s succinct response. He did stop looking at the sag of Mori’s towel.

Mori had gone over to the stove to turn down a burner and put a lid on a pan, but now he looked over at them. “So what brings you by?”

For a moment Iker debated about not bringing up the ghosts. Then he decided that Mori could think he was crazy all he wanted, but he could always point to Hierro as evidence that _something_ was going on, and it wasn’t like Mori could ignore that. And he was running on too little sleep and too much adrenaline to keep his stories straight. “We were attacked by that ghost in the old mansion Hierro always warns people off of, but he won’t tell me where it comes from. I want to know anyway, so can we look in your and Raúl’s records?”

Victor actually grabbed at Iker, like that was going to make Mori un-hear what Iker had just said. But…Mori wasn’t laughing at them. Or being skeptical, or doing anything except looking very seriously at them. Which was weird with the towel, to be honest.

“Wha?” David Villa meandered into the kitchen. His clothes were rumpled and half of his hair was bent one way while the other half was bent the opposite way, and he was trying to glare at Iker through his yawn. Then he padded over to the stove, elbowing Mori out of the way—Mori glanced down, more amused than annoyed—and lifted the lid off the pan. “’fuck are they doing?”

“Visiting, David,” Mori said patiently.

“Whatever. Fucking breakfast? Stupid fucking asshole morons, the hell would they think sticking pens up their noses is a great idea, dragging out my ER shift…” Villa sniffed the food, then went and got a plate and dumped half the pan’s contents on it “…Raúl or you? God, he’s always fucking cooking, ‘s like he thinks he’s everybody’s grandma or something…”

Still muttering away, Villa went out of the kitchen with his plate. Mori put the lid back on the pan, then returned to Iker. “So Hierro doesn’t know you’re looking into this?”

“Nope. And he really shouldn’t, because he’s already made a big deal about how he’s not going to look into it, but people have already gotten hurt and I—okay, I’m sorry, but is he really like that all the time?” Iker pointed in the general direction that Villa had gone. “I thought he just did it to annoy me.”

“What? Oh, David? I just tune it out now.” Then Mori looked soberly at Iker. “Are you—”

“I wouldn’t be here if I thought he’d help, all right?” Iker snapped. He paused, then sighed and looked apologetically at Mori. “It’s been a really long, lousy night. But I just…I’m trying to make sure nobody else gets hurt. And that’s what Hierro thinks he’s doing, but I don’t know if his way is really the right way.”

“Please,” Victor said quietly. He looked like he was going to add something nasty, but instead he abruptly looked away from Mori. “It’s because we know just staying away from the place won’t work.”

Mori bit his lip, then reluctantly inclined his head. But before Iker could relax, he held up his hand. “But it’s mostly going to be in Raúl’s research, Iker. Not mine. I can let you start in what I’ve got, but you’ll have to ask Raúl about his. Not that I think he’ll argue much, but—”

“No, no, that’s great. We can wait for him,” Iker said. “Isn’t he in?”

“I think he’s still asleep. He was up late grading papers, and then he picked up Villa from the hospital. When he’s up, I’ll let him know you’re here,” Mori answered. “In the meantime, you can start in my study.”

* * *

Mori did know what he was talking about, and the various historical records he had weren’t that helpful. It wasn’t really his area anyway—the time period should be, but he was more focused on Andalusia. “Also, if you’re looking into a ghost, you probably want to look into more modern times too,” he said from the doorway. “See if there’s any history of strange occurrences later on.”

Which Iker had already thought about, because he wasn’t an idiot, but he was ninety-nine percent sure that Hierro had gotten everything falling within his power as dean out of circulation and he wasn’t about to break into the man’s office. Yet. “I’ve heard stories since I was a little kid,” he muttered, thumbing through a box of folders. Then he cocked his head. “What about you? You’ve known Hierro longer than I have.”

“He hasn’t said anything to me. At least, not more than you already know, and I never really was interested in that sort of thing so I never bothered looking into it.” Mori was sounding uncomfortable all of a sudden. “Iker, you do realize that he and I _are_ friends, right? We just…disagree on some things.”

“Just like I disagree with him about this. So I’ve always respected your disagreements and all I’m asking is that you respect mine, and not tell him. Anyway, it’s not like we’re actually doing anything yet. We’re just researching,” Iker said under his breath, going back to the files. He paused at one marked with the university’s name, but it just turned out to be a list of notable Andalusian alumni.

Something prodded him in the back, and when he batted it away, Victor hissed at him. “Why don’t you not irritate him into telling Hierro, all right?”

“He’s not going to tell. He said he wouldn’t.” A quick glance over one shoulder told Iker that Mori had left, hopefully to go get Raúl to let them into the good records. Then Iker poked Victor with an elbow to try and get the man to go back to his box. “Mori’s not like that. And whatever the hell is bugging him now, it’s not Hierro.”

“Oh, so you didn’t miss how we said _ghosts_ and he didn’t bat an eye.” For some reason Victor wasn’t taking that as the stroke of good fortune that it was, and actually sounded like he was worried about it. “Maybe he knows too and isn’t telling us.”

Iker finished going through his box and put the lid back on it. He started to get up for the next one, but his cramped calves spasmed when the blood finally rushed back into them and he had to sit back down. “No, he doesn’t, because Mori’s a shit liar.”

“And that’s because you know him too,” Victor said accusingly.

“Yeah, I do. Sorry, I didn’t mean for my dad to have gotten hired for the university’s renovations before I was even _born_ , and get to be friends with zillions of professors.” After another moment, Iker put his elbows on top of the box and blew out his breath as he leaned on them. “Mother of God, what the hell are your parents, anyway?”

The muscle of Victor’s cheek jumped as he stared straight ahead. Then again. He reached up for the butterfly strips on it and Iker automatically grabbed the man’s wrist. Victor stiffened and looked at Iker’s grip on him, but instead of jerking away or shoving Iker, he just put his hand down. Then Iker noticed the man had gone kind of pink.

“They…” The rest trailed off in a mumble. Then Victor glanced at Iker. He grimaced and scrunched his shoulders towards his ears, then mumbled a bit louder.

“Wait. What?” Iker stared at him. “And all this time you’ve been giving _me_ shit—”

“It’s not the same. I didn’t take the free ride to my hometown university, in case you didn’t notice. I came here.” Victor tried to pick at his damn cheek again, and this time Iker kept hold of his hand. “Let go.”

Iker snorted. “Then stop fucking scratching at them. You’ll break one open and it’ll get infected, and then you won’t be pretty anymore.”

“Pretty?” Victor repeated, looking and sounding confused. Confused and a little wary because he was visibly wondering if Iker was making fun of him. Then he rolled his shoulders and jerked his head away to the opposite side. “Anyway. You’re here with everybody who knows you, who’s known you forever. I knew Andrés, but he didn’t come till a year later. You try coming somewhere where nobody knows you, and you can’t fucking leave because you came in the first place because it was the best, and if you go home everybody will wonder why you couldn’t stick it out.”

“I thought you knew Xavi,” Iker said after a moment. Awkward, yeah, but the silence had been more awkward.

Victor shrugged again. “Not right away, not really. He was a friend of a friend, and anyway, he already had a whole bunch of friends here, like you.”

“Okay. Well, that would suck.” Iker fidgeted with something that moved weird, like it had a life of its own. Then he looked down and realized he was playing with Victor’s hand. He let go of it and shifted so he had his knee up and could rest his arm on it. “And I know what having a life that sucks is like, by the way. Maybe not the same way yours does, but…”

“Yeah.” After another moment, Victor put both hands down on the floor and pushed himself up the box. He paused to swipe some hair out of his hands, then looked at Iker. “I’m not…I’m not stupid, you know. I know I’m not the only one in the world with problems, and my problems aren’t as bad as a lot of people’s.”

“But a lot of times it just doesn’t feel like that,” Iker commented. He raised his brows at the surprised look that got him from Victor. “What? I said I do know.”

It looked like Victor first wanted to smack Iker, but he held back on it. Instead he scuffed his feet against the floor, then let his shoulders drop and sighed, glancing at the ceiling. He looked half-heartedly at the box behind him next, then paused. The side of his mouth twitched as he looked up at Iker. “Pretty? Really?”

“I kissed you, didn’t I?”

“Do you know how much of a dick you sound like when you say that kind of thing?” Victor said after a second.

Iker was sort of annoyed, but not as much as he normally would’ve been. Chalk it up to the ghosts. “Well, if I don’t, Xavi usually tells me.”

Victor’s mouth moved like he was going to snort, but then he leaned over. He pushed Iker back till Iker ran into the box; his elbow banged its edge before he got it up and over the top. Then Iker pulled his arm off and touched the side of Victor’s face, careful to do it behind the last cut. Against his mouth Victor tensed a little, then relaxed and leaned his head into Iker’s cradling hand.

It wasn’t as frenzied as the moment in Victor’s kitchen, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t as—as _hot_. In fact it was hotter, somehow. Slower, but that meant there was time for Iker to really sink into the kisses, for them to send little liquid tingles down his body to melt his knees. It was a damn good thing they were sitting.

“Iker—oh.” Raúl didn’t sound embarrassed, and once Iker and Victor had untangled themselves from the jumble they’d startled themselves into it, the man was standing there in the doorway watching them with one of his resigned faces on. “Mori told me you wanted to do some research on ghosts.” Then he looked at a flaming-red Victor. “Hello. I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Yeah, the ghosts in the—” Iker started hastily, trying to get up.

“Ahem.” The resignation in Raúl’s face hardened a bit. He nodded meaningfully at Victor.

Hopefully Victor could see now that there were benefits in going somewhere nobody knew you, Iker thought mutinously. Then he sighed, summoned up a polite face, and introduced the two to each other.

* * *

As long as the formalities were taken care of, Raúl was always unfailingly gracious. And, thankfully, practical-minded, and not as nervy about hiding things from Hierro as Mori. In short order, he’d heard the story, apologized for not knowing much about it himself and agreed with Iker that going to Hierro would be pointless. Then he had helped them find the most likely microfiche rolls, copies of newspaper clippings and so forth, and left them in one of the rooms to work through it all.

Victor had basically shut up during the whole thing, which Iker was coming to recognize as a bad sign. Iker had tried to draw the man out, or at least get him to agree to a research plan, but Victor just kept his head down and grunted at him.

What it was probably going to take was another argument, but the long night and early morning was beginning to catch up to Iker with a vengeance and he didn’t feel like it. Well, to be honest, he probably wouldn’t feel like it even on a good night’s sleep, but he…he just wanted to know what the fuck was going on. And for it to stop, so he could go home and go to bed without having to worry that some weird thing was going to break in while he was there.

Iker dropped the folder he’d been looking through and got up. He half-noticed Victor looking up at him, but just muttered he needed to piss and went out into the hall.

Once he was there, he figured he might as well use the bathroom, but after that he didn’t immediately go back. It felt good to stretch out his legs, and when he caught sight of a clock in another room, he was shocked to find out how much time they’d spent digging through old documents. In fact, he had to go into that room and check the clock more closely just to make sure he wasn’t imagining it.

Eventually he had to admit that he wasn’t. He reluctantly stepped back from the clock, then sighed and turned towards the windows. This really wasn’t how he’d reckoned on spending his weekend, he thought.

He had been staring out at the lawn for several seconds when he noticed something odd. His reflection was blurry, like the glass was dirty, or maybe like his eyesight was going. Frowning, Iker moved closer, and he started to notice other things. Like that he looked a lot paler, and his hair was a different color, and his mouth was moving even though he wasn’t speak—

The next thing he knew, he was sprawled face-down in the hallway, and people were calling out in concerned voices. And somebody was coming towards him. He panicked and scrambled up, but accidentally managed to drive his head into the wall in his hurry. Dazed, he slumped back and somebody grabbed him. He almost kicked them away before he realized it sounded like Victor.

“Window—he was looking in at me—” That was all Iker managed to get out before he ran out of breath.

He and Victor stared at each other. Victor had gone ashen in the face, and when Iker pointed at the room, Victor flinched so that he edged away from the doorway. But then the other man hissed low under his breath. He took his hands off Iker and twisted them around each other, biting his lip. Then he inhaled sharply, spun around and got up. He went into the room before Iker could stop him.

By then Raúl had hurried in and he almost got in Iker’s way as Iker lunged after Victor. Iker sent himself off-balance again and had to grab the jamb for balance, but by then Victor was already coming back out. The moment he was in reach, Iker grabbed him. “Are you fucking insane?”

Victor had instinctively put his hands up to Iker’s arms, but then he just stood and looked at Iker, completely uncomprehending. Then he blinked and nodded over his shoulder. “He’s not there now.”

“Who isn’t?” Raúl said.

“What the fuck’s going on?” Villa came down the hall. He was tidier than before, but still had the same scowl on his face. “Why are you still here?”

“Because some fucking ghost is stalking me, you grumpy little shit! And I don’t like it, and I don’t like thinking it’s going to come get me or Victor, and I want to know how to make it go away!” Iker snapped. “There, you happy now? _That’s_ why.”

Villa…stopped scowling. He was still squinting at Iker, but the look on his face was damn near thoughtful. Then he snorted. “Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so?”

* * *

Luckily for Villa’s neck, Silva showed up in time for him and Raúl to get them all to go to the kitchen, where Iker was shoved in a chair and handed a mug of hot chocolate dosed with a slug of something alcoholic. Victor was offered one too, but he refused, and insistently enough that it threw off Raúl before they ended up bundled into blankets or something like that.

“So it’s probably trying to tell you something,” Silva said matter-of-factly. “I think you’re right and it’s not the same one as in the cupboard, but hey, maybe it’s the other guy? The one who didn’t come back and let him out?”

Villa was watching Raúl rummage in some cabinets, but he showed he was still following the conversation with his disbelieving snort. “Shouldn’t he be showing up for Victor too, then? They both saw the first one.”

“I didn’t see it,” Victor muttered, but he didn’t push the point like he had before. He kept twisting impatiently in his chair, despite multiple dirty looks from multiple people. “And I don’t want to see this one, even if it wants to say something. How do we know it’s not just wanting to hurt us like that other one?”

“Well, it hasn’t hurt Iker yet.” Then Silva looked at Iker, who was feeling considerably better but who wasn’t exactly dumping out his mug. “I mean, physically. And I hate to say this, but it might not go away till it says what it wants to say.”

Raúl grunted in quiet triumph and pulled out a small cardboard box, which he set on the counter. He took off the lid and began to take out small bottles of some clear liquid. “I knew I still had some of these.”

“Damn it. I thought I’d tossed all of those,” Villa muttered.

Both Raúl and Silva looked irritated with him, and Iker was amused to see Villa actually huddling up against their looks. Then Silva coughed into his hand. He moved his shoulders uncomfortably and avoided the glances he attracted. “So…he does know about this sort of thing. Even if he’s—”

“He’s a fucking lunatic with a fucking lunatic lawyer and an evil fucking tongue,” Villa snapped. “His fucking water didn’t do half as much as—”

“As your psychotic streak?” Raúl said dryly. He ignored Villa’s openmouthed stare and carried the bottles over to the table, where he set them down in front of Iker and Victor. “It’s holy water. It’s not a permanent cure, but it will keep them away temporarily.”

Iker looked at the bottles, then up at Raúl’s solemn face. Then back at the bottles. “I know I haven’t been visiting that much lately, but what the _hell_ did I miss?”

“Who’s the lunatic?” Victor asked.

“Fucking Figo.” Having recovered from his squashed ego, Villa was eyeing the bottles like they might jump at him any moment. “Bastard claims he’s an exorcist.”

“Wait, _Luís_?” A quick check at Raúl’s face confirmed Iker’s guess, and at that point Iker couldn’t hold back his laugh any longer. He sank back in his chair, then wiped at his eyes when he’d gone down to mere chuckles. “Seriously? I thought that was just him being drunk.”

Villa threw up his hands with a victorious ‘hah!’ and looked expectantly at Raúl. Who merely stared back, with that mild patience of his that could even wear down Hierro on occasion. After a moment, Villa subsided back into his paranoid grumbling.

“If that would have worked, I think Figo would have tried it already,” Raúl said to Silva. When Silva looked confused, he turned to Iker, as if that made any more sense to Iker. “You did say Pep was there too, didn’t you? It’s not like Pep and Fernando to leave a danger like that where it could hurt others. They must have tried already, and for some reason it didn’t work.”

Silva still looked confused. “The dean would really do that? I mean, you know them better than me, but he just doesn’t seem like that type.”

“Guardiola and Hierro are really close,” Iker explained. “If Pep said to try something, Hierro would try it.”

“Wait, I thought Guardiola and Figo were—” Villa started, coming out of his muttering.

“It didn’t work because they don’t know about the second ghost,” Victor abruptly said. He stiffened and dropped his eyes to the table when they all looked at him, and for a moment it didn’t seem like he’d go on. Then he jerked one shoulder back and slumped in his seat. “Because Hierro just warned us off that room, and we haven’t seen the one from there again. But this one, it’s outside and he didn’t mention it.”

After a moment, Iker pushed himself up and his mug away. “And he would have, if he’d known. He wouldn’t have let either of us just go off if he hadn’t been sure that we’d be all right as long as we left the house alone. But that doesn’t mean the two things go together. Why would it? Why can’t we take care of one ghost and then the other?”

“Yeah, well, I found something—right before I heard you in the hall.” Victor glanced up and a flash of annoyance went over his face. “I’ve been trying to say for the last few minutes. I found this arrest record for a man trespassing on a neighboring property. He couldn’t explain why he was there, but when they tried to drag him off, he fought so much that they beat him, and he was unconscious when they brought him in to the jail.”

“Did he wake up?” Silva finally asked.

“It was an arrest record. It didn’t say.” But from the way Victor clipped his words, he was thinking what they all were about that. Then he looked at Iker. “So they do go together. The one’s still waiting, and the other one’s still trying to get in. And you grabbed me, so that’s why that one is watching you, I think. He wants you to get his friend out.”

* * *

“Talk about punishing a good deed,” Iker muttered.

Even if Raúl hadn’t been a historian, they would’ve needed some proof to back up Victor’s theory. But Raúl being who he was, he had immediately started pulling out records and searching the online archives for follow-up to the document Victor had found. Right now he had Silva looking for a record of death and Villa looking for any sort of later judicial proceeding, and he was on the phone to the head librarian asking about cemeteries. Something about family plots.

Iker and Victor were still sitting in the kitchen with damp hair from getting holy water sprinkled all over them, since even though Victor hadn’t seen the second one yet, they wanted to be careful. Half-eaten plates of food from lunch were scattered around in front of them—mostly Villa eating, as if even Raúl’s cooking could make him less scrawny—and Victor had been poking at some beans with his fork for the past few minutes. After his big epiphany, he’d lapsed back into one of his moody silent spells.

To be honest, Iker wasn’t really that into talking either. He knew he should get up and help Raúl track down the identity of the two men, but he didn’t want to do it.

“Are you still going to try and get rid of them?” Victor suddenly asked, looking up from his plate.

“Well, if the one’s following me everywhere, I don’t really have a choice.” Iker slouched in his chair, which made his hand slide across the table to knock into his plate. He moved his hand, then turned it to point at the plate’s rim with one finger. Then he sighed and let his head fall back against the chair. “He _is_ trying to tell me something. That’s why his mouth is always moving.”

After a moment’s silence, Victor pushed back from the table. He picked up all the forks and spoons and knives, and piled them into one empty plate that he used to ferry them over to the sink. Then he came back for the other plates.

“You’re okay,” Iker added after a second. He shrugged at Victor, who had stopped where he was, bent over to get Iker’s plate. “Actually, it hasn’t shown up when you’ve been around, so maybe it can’t show itself to you. So you could go home.”

Victor looked at the plate. Then he picked it up and went to the sink. Something about the way he moved made Iker straighten up a bit, so Iker was looking when the man damn near banged the plate onto the counter. “I’m not going home,” Victor said tightly. “If you think I’m some kind of fucking—”

“I think you shouldn’t break somebody else’s kitchen!” Then Iker kicked back from the table and stood up. He watched the other man stalk back to the table before throwing out his arm to block Victor from taking anything else. Then he grabbed Victor by the forearm. “Jesus Christ, what’s _with_ you?”

For a moment Victor tried to twist free. Then he gave up with an angry exhale and let Iker pull him around the table. “I just don’t get—” he started. He paused and glanced to the side, then let out another irritated breath. “You _have_ people. And maybe people like me give you shit about it, but you still have them and you should appreciate that. It’s not like you’ll have to go back there by yourself.”

“Well, we don’t know that yet, do we? I mean, I’m the only one who saw either of them and you just felt the one. So maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m special again, and it has to be me, because I’m Iker Casillas and I’m _always_ the fucking one at this goddamn university,” Iker snapped.

“Maybe you are, but you’re not going by yourself.” Victor looked back at Iker, long and angry and determined. Then his mouth moved in a kind of grimace and he abruptly dropped his gaze to their feet. “You’re not.”

Iker didn’t completely understand, except that he wasn’t as pissed off as he had been mere seconds ago, and somehow that was annoying. He’d rather be pissed off than…than the feeling that wanted to come through, which—fine, which was fucking panicking. Because it was one thing to say he was going to get rid of the ghosts and fix everything, and another to look at one of the damn things in _broad daylight_ and realize what that might take.

“What if—”

“Then we’ll find some way that doesn’t need that.” Victor put up his hand and pushed it against his neck till a bone popped. He grimaced, then looked back at Iker over his arm. “Look. That thing in the house—that one, it was really fucking mad. I don’t know if it’s going to _let_ you deliver whatever goddamn message, and if it tries to drag you in, somebody had better be around to pull you out like you did for me.”

After a long moment, Iker just shrugged. He glanced at the table, then absentmindedly flicked his thumbnail at a crumb on it. “You think it’s going to be any better than the first time?”

“No, of course not. I was scared shitless then and if it happens again, I’ll be even more fucking scared, because now I know what it is. Kind of.” Then Victor frowned and leaned in to peer at Iker’s face. He ignored Iker’s lame push at his shoulder, then moved back a little. “What, is that it?”

“That I’m scared out of my goddamn mind?” Iker snorted. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Victor blinked a few times. He wasn’t exactly surprised at the revelation, but maybe that Iker had actually admitted it to him. “Well, I’m coming with you, anyway.”

“You realize it won’t make me feel any better if you end up getting hurt again,” Iker said after a moment.

To which Victor rolled his eyes. “Why are you always such a _dick_ about—”

Iker pulled him forward by an arm and some part of his jeans. Probably a belt-loop. Anyway, their bodies bumped together and then Victor stumbled, so his mouth hit more Iker’s chin than anything else, and Iker’s hand slid off Victor’s hip and back around the man’s ass. He—yeah, he kind of grabbed it. Whatever, he full-out grabbed it, because Victor had moved his head and their mouths were properly matching, and it was hitting Iker low and hard in the gut and he needed something to hold onto right then.

Victor shrugged off Iker’s hand from his arm, then put his own hand on Iker’s back, fingertips down first. They dug in, then worked up to curl over the back of Iker’s neck, the thumb slipping easy and smooth into the hollow behind Iker’s ear. He pressed his mouth to Iker’s lower lip, then sucked in Iker’s tongue as Iker ran his fingers haphazardly into the other man’s hair. The thick strands were coarse, almost sandpapery one way and then silky the other, and when Iker pulled at them, Victor bit him. Not that hard, just sort of annoyed and teasing rolled together, and also an excuse to lick at the spot while Iker tried not to make embarrassing noises.

“Oh, my God.”

It would’ve been nice if Victor had kissed away _that_ bite too, but he had knocked himself backwards into a chair almost before Iker’s lip was stinging. He also managed to hit Iker’s hurt arm, which gave Iker an excuse to curse and grab at it and not look up for another couple of seconds.

Victor was sitting at the table and rubbing hard at one side of his piquillo-colored face, while in the kitchen doorway, Silva and Xavi were competing for the prize of whose eyes were rounder. And behind them Hierro was just doing that carefully neutral expression of his, where he knew he just needed to wait a bit for somebody to blurt out the truth.

“What’s the matter?” Raúl came in, looked around at them all and sighed. “Iker, I don’t mind you bringing people over, but I think I told you, not in the kitchen.”

“I didn’t—we weren’t—” Iker’s hands were up and moving by themselves, like spastic spiders had crawled into them.

“It’s just not very hygienic,” Raúl added. Then he glanced sharply at Silva, whose entire face had twitched oddly.

Iker finally gave up. He dropped himself back against the table, then flapped an annoyed hand at Raúl, Hierro and Xavi, one after the other. “Okay, first? I have my own place and I don’t need to come here for _that_. Second—second, I’m sorry, Fernando, but if you can’t keep the damn things from following me around, which you can’t, then you can’t really tell me not to look into it. You can keep lying if you want, but I’m going to find out one way or the other. And thanks a _lot_ , Xavi.”

“We can’t go back to your place,” Victor muttered inanely. “It’s been there.”

“Shit. _Shit_ , Iker, it’s not—” Xavi took a step forward, his hand out towards Iker. “I didn’t _tell_ him—”

“It’s not his fault, Iker,” Hierro said firmly. Then his stance crumpled a little, and Iker noticed for the first time how dark the circles under his eyes were. “Look. Sit down and let me explain.”

* * *

“When we were students here, Pep and I heard the stories from one of the teaching assistants,” Hierro began. Then he stopped and looked at the table. He smoothed one of his hands across a whorl in the wood-grain, then picked it up and rubbed at his eye. “We were curious, and sneaked in to see for ourselves. We got a bit farther than you—Pep was looking in the cupboard when it tried to pull him in.”

Only Silva, perched on the kitchen counter, sucked in his breath, but as Iker looked around the table, the rest of them pretty much felt the same way. Even Villa, who had actually complained to Hierro that he’d interrupted a good search—as if he _had_ to come along and hear the story.

“He got away from it almost right away, but he had bruises on his neck…” Hierro traced his own throat with one finger “…and I do think they lasted longer than ordinary ones. After that, we spent nearly any moment we had trying to find out who these men were, and how we could lay them to rest. We even tried a few…well, I suppose you’d call them spells. Luís was helping too, and he actually turned out to have a talent for it, but that’s another story.”

“So that’s these bastards’ fault,” Villa muttered.

Iker was pulling his foot back when Villa jerked and glowered in Xavi’s direction. Of course Iker looked thankfully at Xavi, who blinked in surprise, and then Iker remembered he still wasn’t sure if he was mad at the man. So he looked back at Hierro.

“None of them worked, and the last one nearly killed someone because…because as far as we can tell, the thing weakens the farther it goes from that room, and it can’t leave the third floor at all. But we almost—we almost changed that. Freed it.” Hierro had to pause for a moment to collect himself, and Iker couldn’t help looking away. It just wasn’t what he was used to, seeing the man so upset. “After that, we decided that it was safer not to meddle.”

“But you didn’t know there was another one,” Xavi blurted out. He gave Iker a regretful look. “I didn’t…I wasn’t going to tell him. But I wanted to talk to him, because I was wondering if they’d try coming to your place again and if he’d ever heard of something like that.”

“So he pretended that it’d actually happened to him, but none of you lie very well to me.” A faint smile darted across Hierro’s face. Then he sighed and the lines that grooved his brow and around his mouth deepened. “I’ve never heard of another ghost. We never saw one. If I’d known—Iker, I’m sorry that you felt like you had no choice but to disobey me. I would have liked it if you’d come and told me, but I can see why you didn’t, and I apologize. I should have been more open, but…I have had one moment in my life where I thought somebody had died because of me, and I wanted to avoid having another. Especially if it involved you.”

Iker pressed his lips together, while Hierro kept looking at him with that expression of terrible sadness and while everybody else waited for an answer. He should’ve been mad at Iker, was all Iker could think for a moment. Should’ve been mad, and not acting like he was afraid Iker would never forgive him, when Iker was basically just another kid who’d been pestering him a bit longer than the rest.

“I just…you know, I just wanted to know,” Iker finally muttered, dropping his eyes to the table. He fidgeted with one cuff, then pushed his hand up his arm to touch the bandage under his sleeve. “I didn’t want to go around you, but it was so fucking…I had to know.”

“I know.” Then Hierro reached over and ruffled Iker’s hair. Usually it would kind of annoy Iker, because that’d been what the man had done since Iker could remember, but this time made Iker relax. “I know, and that’s why I’m going to give you the research Pep and I did so you can look at it. He has most of it, but I’ve already called him and he’ll bring it over. And—Raúl, did you call Luís yet?”

“No,” Raúl said. He ignored Villa’s shocked but obviously pleased face and stared back at Hierro. “Can I speak with you in the…”

Hierro was already on his feet. “Of course.” Then he stopped and looked at Victor. “Well, in a moment. Have you seen it too?”

“No.” Victor was startled at being addressed and stammered a bit before he went on. “No, but I believe Iker when he says he has.”

“Then you haven’t had any nightmares either?” Hierro asked. He dipped his head in apology at Victor’s confused stare. “Pep and I both had some awful dreams afterward. Not like Iker’s—they were mostly memories of what had happened—but it took a long time for them to go. If you have that sort of problem and it affects your classes, let me know.”

Still looking like somebody had hit him on the head, Victor just nodded and moved over so Hierro could get past him to the hall. His elbow bumped into Iker’s arm and he looked over at Iker’s sucked-in breath, then grimaced. “Arm?”

“Kind of, yeah.” Iker watched Villa go out too, like the man had a right to eavesdrop, and then an exasperated Silva follow, promising them that he’d drag Villa back to the research before Hierro killed him. Then he shrugged off Victor’s nervous touch at his arm. “It’s okay. Just—watch it.”

He was more paying attention to Xavi, sitting across from them and still looking downcast. “I really didn’t mean for him to come over,” Xavi said after a moment. “I was just worried—because the other one clawed up Victor, and it’s so fucking creepy that it knows where you live.”

“Yeah.” Then Iker blew out his breath and let his head fall against the chair. He stared at the ceiling for a moment before dragging himself upright. “Look, Xavi…it’s okay. Seriously. And anyway, it looks like it’s better this way, since now we’re getting everything Hierro’s got, and I bet he’s got a lot. Him and Guardiola. It’ll be a lot easier to figure things out.”

“I just want you to know that I wouldn’t fuck you over like that,” Xavi said earnestly. “You’re my friend.”

“Yeah, I know.” Iker snorted, then smiled at the other man. “Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t done something like this to you a couple times. It’s fine.”

Victor shifted restlessly in his seat, and Iker was afraid the man was going into another one of his other-people-being-friendly-somehow-means-my-life-sucks moods, but instead Victor was looking straight back at Iker. “As long as you’re done, too.”

It took a moment for Iker to remember, and then he rolled his eyes. “Okay, _fine_ , I’m bringing you. All right?”

“Great,” Victor said flatly. Then he shifted around again, turning towards Iker so his one shoulder pressed into the space between the spindles in the chair’s back. He worked his jaw a couple times, fighting with something, and then his face suddenly relaxed. It was—kind of like somebody had pushed their hand over him, smoothing down the skin, and he closed his eyes too like he was about to fall asleep against the chair. “Your dates suck, by the way.”

Iker laughed. He started to reach for the other man, but then stopped—because Xavi could be weird, with reading Iker’s mind and also with staring like that, so that even though he wasn’t making a sound, his total shock was still as loud as a brass band tooting through the room. Xavi looked at Iker, then at Victor, and Iker looked at Victor too and realized what all that teeth-grinding had been about. 

Once upon a time—like, _Thursday_ —Iker would have just written off all the effort it took Victor to make one snarky comment as drama-queen grandstanding. Now Iker just finished reaching over and flicking that piece of hair out of Victor’s eyes. Which had opened a little, peering out at him through slivers fringed with long thick lashes that brushed the back of Iker’s finger.

“So…” Xavi looked like he almost felt bad about interrupting, but then he grinned wryly at them. “Can I be honest for a moment? And say that, well, I’m happy, but also, I kind of want to kick the hell out of both of you right now?”

“Seems fair,” Victor said after a moment, pushing himself back up the chair. “You should get a turn at being an asshole once in a while.”

Iker snorted. “Then me first, Xavi. Can’t kick Victor while he’s wounded.”

Predictably, Victor shot him a dirty look. Less predictably, Victor yawned in the middle of it, and then managed to infect Iker so suddenly Iker was trying to break his jaw getting it to open wider.

“You guys should probably take a nap,” Xavi said. “I can help them look through the papers when they get here, and if we find anything, I’ll wake you up.”

* * *

Iker wasn’t going back to his place for obvious reasons, and Victor lived on the other side of campus. And Raúl had a lot of spare rooms around, and for some reason Raúl insisted that no ghost was going to get inside his house, even if it could look in from the outside. Which shouldn’t be that much of a problem now since he’d had Mori doing something to the lawn to keep them away, and which both explained where the hell Mori had gone and was getting Raúl the same looks from Hierro that Iker had been giving the man since they’d come over. Apparently, a lot of the people Iker knew hadn’t been telling each other things.

It still made Iker feel a little weird about sacking out on an air mattress, which he was pretty sure was Villa’s given the size, in Raúl’s study. Okay, it wasn’t really that.

Victor rolled over on his side, looked at Iker, and then started to get up. “I’m taking the couch.”

“You slept on a couch last night, and look what that did for your attitude,” Iker muttered, grabbing his arm. “Just don’t hog all the blankets and I’ll be fine.”

After some resistance, Victor gave in. But he didn’t lie back down right away, instead propping himself up on his elbows and looking skeptically at Iker. “Iker, I’m _always_ like that.” He glanced away for a moment. “Though since you’re not being a dick to me now just because you can, I’ll try…I’ve been working on it for a while anyway. But—”

“I wasn’t exactly thinking you’d turn into a happy camper just because we made out a couple times.” Iker flopped back onto the mattress and stared at the ceiling. He still had his hand on Victor’s arm, but it slipped so it was more lying on it than gripping it.

“So what do you think’s going to happen?” Victor asked after a moment. He sounded a little tight in the throat.

Maybe he was mad, maybe he was nervous. It would’ve been easy to look over and see, but Iker didn’t turn his head. “I guess…you’ll be a cranky jackass, and I’ll be an entitled dick, and hopefully we’ll get my stalker ghost to go away and I don’t know, Jesus. I’m not a goddamn prophet here. I’d just like to get the ghosts out of the way and then see what it’s like without that hanging over our heads.”

The mattress creaked and rocked under Iker. Victor moved his arm so Iker’s hand came off it completely; Iker lifted his arm and Victor moved so they were lying right up against each other, and if it wasn’t for Iker’s hand in the way, Victor would be looking down at him. So…Iker moved his hand a little, and Victor was looking at him. Thoughtful without a trace of that sullen anger that was usually simmering in him.

“Even if you’re still a dick, you’re not just—a dick. I kind of know you now,” Victor said slowly. He chewed at the side of his lip, then let it away from his teeth and looked closer at Iker. “So what? If it’s that you’re worried about—well, I don’t really want my _dean_ walking in on us again. Or a bunch of professors, or…just how often does that happen with you, anyway?”

“Well, I thought about just not dating anybody from university for a while, but that doesn’t really work either because I’m still a student here and I can’t really stay away from campus,” Iker muttered. He quirked a brow at Victor. “It’d be a good excuse to back out.”

Victor elbowed him hard in the ribs, which Iker had half-expected, and then put his head down on Iker’s chest, which was…not as much pressure as Iker would’ve thought, and kind of warm, and kind of nice. “You’re a prick.” He turned his head so his cheek was against Iker’s shoulder. “And stop trying to scare me into going away. I got ripped up by a fucking ghost, Casillas. You being a prick can’t top that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” After a moment, when he was sure the other man wouldn’t move, Iker carefully put his arm down around Victor. He let his hand loosely hook behind the man’s back and Victor moved his own arm to accommodate it. “The last time I fell asleep, I saw it.”

“But you were fine when I woke up,” Victor said. Not contradicting or accusing, just remembering. “I don’t think you’d had a nightmare before. Nothing was knocked around, not like when I came back in.”

“Yeah. When you came back.” And when he’d come running down the hall while Iker was trying to crawl out of Raúl’s sitting room, and maybe—it might be a stretch but Iker really didn’t know what was stretching it now—when he’d gone to hide behind his bush and Iker had been standing there on the sidewalk by himself, with his skin crawling, and something had gone to his flat.

Victor lifted his head and looked at Iker. Then he laid down again, pulling more of himself over. He squirmed a little when Iker tugged the blankets over them, but settled down when Iker stopped. “I’ll wake you up if I have to go piss or anything like that, okay?”

Iker opened his mouth, then closed it. He tried to look at Victor, but even if he lifted his head, it was too awkward and all he saw was hair. So he put his head back down. “Okay.”

All Victor said was some meaningless snuffle noise, but he wrapped his hand around the back of Iker’s bicep tight. Any other time it wouldn’t have been comfortable, but right then, it was enough for Iker to drift off to sleep.

* * *

He was in some kind of cramped, dark space and he couldn’t move. At first he wasn’t sure if it was because the place was too small and he tried to lash out, but then he found that his body wouldn’t move.

Iker told himself not to panic. He was still breathing. He could get out of this, whatever the hell it was. All he had to do was—move something. Figure that out. And it wasn’t as if he was totally paralyzed, because he could still feel the parts of his body. They just wouldn’t move for him, as if they were too heavy and stiff, but he knew they weren’t and he knew he just needed to—to shift them. His foot. He needed his foot to move. He needed to get out now, goddamn it. If he didn’t, he was going to be late and he didn’t know for what exactly, but he knew if he didn’t get going, it’d be bad.

It smelled awful where he was, too. His breathing was speeding up so the stench was getting worse and worse, like someone had plunged him head-first into a pile of rotting trash. The air was all thick and oily too, slicking the inside of his mouth with a disgusting film, and he wanted to turn his head away from it but he couldn’t. He forgot about the foot and being late and everything else, and just wanted to move his head. But he couldn’t, and he was stuck, and _then something touched his face_ —

For a moment Iker just sat there and gasped to himself. He stared at the room without taking it in, then absently lifted his hand. He was going to push at his temple but instead he stared at his fingers, amazed when they wiggled for him. A cold wet drop rolled into his left eye and he had to stop marveling at his hand to wipe it away, and then he realized he was covered in clammy sweat.

“Fucking Christ,” someone muttered. Then the thing under Iker moved and he nearly kicked Victor in the head as the other man crawled back onto the air mattress. Victor flinched back, his hands squeezing the mattress edge so it creaked. He stared at Iker and Iker finally noticed that he was just as disheveled, with his shirt rucked up and around so it was bunched at his ribs. After another moment, Victor sighed and yanked down his shirt. “Nightmare?”

“I guess it’d have to be.” It hadn’t felt like a nightmare, Iker almost said, but he cut himself off so hard that he bit his own lip. Then he jabbed the sore spot trying to put his finger to it. He sucked in his breath, then put his hands down on the bed and swore, trying to get a grip on himself. He was awake. He was awake, and not in a fucking horror movie, and—and he could at least sound less stupid about it.

He heard something move and looked over to see Victor’s tentatively outstretched hand. Victor’s fingers snapped down like he was going to take away his hand, but then he muttered something and moved to sit down by Iker. “For the record, I didn’t go anywhere.”

“Didn’t say you did,” Iker mumbled. He ran one hand across his gross sweaty forehead, then back over the top of his head.

“You were saying you had to go, and then you went stiff all of a sudden,” Victor added after a moment. He glanced at Iker. “I was kind of awake already, but then you…so I tried to wake you up, but—”

“Did I hit you?” Iker asked.

Victor looked sharply at Iker. Then he shrugged one shoulder. He looked down, then stuffed away a piece of blanket that had been between them. “You shoved me off when you finally did wake up, but it didn’t exactly look like you knew you were doing it.”

“Sorry.” Iker let his head tilt back, then pulled it forward. A muscle in his neck snapped and he grimaced, then kneaded at it.

“Did you…did you see him again?” Victor asked quietly.

Iker shook his head. Then he shook it again, harder. He mumbled something rude to Victor’s asking if he was all right before flopping backward down on the bed. The mattress groaned and for a moment he wondered if he’d popped it.

He hadn’t. Then Victor hauled himself over so he could look Iker in the face, pissed off about something again, and the mattress abruptly squished under them. “Look,” Victor started fiercely. “I know it fucking sucks, but if you’re just going to keep it to yourself—I _know_ that doesn’t work, okay? I know, and I’m living proof that—”

“If the guy just forgot his friend or remembered him but couldn’t go back in time, why the hell would he be in the cupboard?” Iker said. He stared at the ceiling. Then he looked at Victor, who was chewing his lip and looking like he hadn’t made up his mind whether Iker was crazy or just annoying. “Remember what Hierro said? He said they found him there.”

“I remember,” Victor snapped.

“So I don’t think—I don’t know if we’ve got the right story. Something’s really fucked up here.” Then Iker snorted and covered his face. “Don’t even say it. I know.”

Victor’s tone could have cut solid lead. “I wasn’t going to.”

Iker took his hand away and found he was looking at the other man’s back: Victor had hunched up with his arm wrapped around his knees. His shoulder twitched as Iker pushed himself up, but he didn’t look back. A nasty comment came to the tip of Iker’s tongue, but instead Iker just messed with the blanket a bit.

“Not saying your idea couldn’t be right, too. I just think there might be more going on,” Iker said. He shifted his weight onto his left hand, which was farther from the other man.

“Thanks.” That curt word lingered in the air for a couple seconds. Then Victor drew in a deep, slightly uneven breath. He held it, then turned sharply around. “You know, you’re—”

He said the rest of it into Iker’s mouth, which made for a toothy kiss and not really in a good way. Then he stopped moving. _Then_ he shoved at Iker’s shoulder. Iker was already leaning back, but he was off-balance and had to stop to grab the mattress, and that was when Victor wrapped his hand around Iker’s shoulder and yanked them down. So Iker’s hand kind of tried to punch through the suspiciously giving mattress instead, because he was nice enough to not want to flatten Victor and all that.

Victor didn’t apparently care. He had both his hands in Iker’s hair now, trying to knot his fingers in it even though it definitely wasn’t long enough for that, and was going to fucking town on Iker’s mouth. In Iker’s mouth. Anyway, Iker’s hands were on his ass again, semi-magically, and Victor was pushing down into them, and it felt a hell of a lot better than Iker’s goddamn dreams.

“So where’d I hit you?” Iker said. Mostly grunted, which was a minor annoyance because he would’ve liked to have sounded smoother about it and not so much like a fifty-year-old bum in the corner of the bar. At least it did confuse Victor long enough for Iker to grin and run a hand down the man’s thigh. “You know, so I can show I really do appreciate you trying to make me feel bet—”

Not even bothering with a retort, Victor pulled Iker back down and kissed Iker hard enough for Iker to start worrying more about whether his jeans were going to hold up. Which maybe was kind of a stupid thought anyway, since why did they need to hold up? Victor’s shirt wasn’t really doing it, sliding up his belly like that, and that felt really _good_ , and—

“That’s my fucking bed!”

No faster way to kill Iker’s mood than Villa’s outraged squeak of a voice. Iker jerked his head up, ready to roll his eyes, and looked straight into Hierro’s arched brows. So he got off Victor and opted instead to just rub at his face. Every single fucking person he dated. Every single one of them.

“My bed! My _bed_ , and—and did you fucking burst it? You did, you asshole!” Villa was screaming. “You broke it!”

“Oh, my God, Guaje, it’s not like you use it anymore anyway,” Silva said. “They’re traumatized. Cut ‘em some slack.”

Iker looked up just in time to see Silva pushing by the gaping Villa. Silva came up to the bed, looked over them critically—which made Iker feel weirder than having Hierro walk in on him, actually—and then held out a sheet of paper. “Okay, so you’re decent, so you might wanna know we found something.”

“Like _hell_ was that trauma!” Villa finally managed in the background.

Hierro looked over his shoulder at somebody, then gave them a short, imperious nod of the head that also pointed towards Villa. Then he stepped into the doorway, while somewhere behind him Villa’s indignant yelps suddenly cut off. He looked solemnly down at Iker and Victor. “We’ve found a grave,” he said.

* * *

They reconvened in Raúl’s living room. Including Villa, who still looked mortally injured by everything but who had thankfully shut up after Mori had muttered something about him having even worse coping mechanisms. Whenever this was all over, Iker really, really had to get one of the people in Raúl’s house drunk and get the story out of them. The nervous tics alone were _fascinating_.

But yeah, first the ghosts that were ruining Iker’s life. He skimmed the documents that Guardiola had handed him, then handed them to Victor so the other man didn’t have to look like he was breaking his neck to read over Iker’s shoulder. Then he looked at Guardiola and Hierro. “So how does this help? We know who they were now and where they’re buried, but since they’re obviously not staying put, I don’t see what this does.”

“The point is—” Hierro paused and looked at Raúl, who had reverted about ten years and was studiously examining some other papers “—the point is, that there are rituals to lay restless spirits, so long as the location of the body is known. However, Raúl has…made a very good argument that that isn’t what’s needed here.”

“They’re trying to finish up what happened when they were alive, so I don’t see how anything but that would do it,” Victor said under his breath. He didn’t check for Hierro’s reaction, but he was doing that fidgeting thing that meant he was nervous.

Iker was looking for the reaction, but he didn’t get one, because just as Hierro was drawing himself up, Guardiola reached across him for a bottle of water. So instead Hierro looked at Guardiola, who casually swigged some water before wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Exactly Raúl’s point, and I agree,” Guardiola said. He had ink stains on his fingers, Iker absently noticed. “Just as well, since Luís isn’t in town.”

Hierro blinked. Then he looked at Guardiola. “I thought you said he came in Thursday.”

“Well, he _did_ , but then he had to take a call.” A very faint hint of displeasure could be heard in Guardiola’s otherwise bland voice.

“The sort of call where he goes to Milan for a month?” Hierro asked. The corners of his mouth were trying to go up, and he was resisting them ferociously.

“No, the kind where he thinks I know something about French law, and then wonders why I have your slippers under my couch,” Guardiola muttered. He stared down into his empty bottle, then started as Raúl handed him a full one. With a thankful smile—Iker automatically looked for Mori’s hackles rising, then blinked hard as he saw Villa giving Guardiola the same lip-curling look of disgust—he patted Raúl on the shoulder and then cracked off the bottle’s top. “Anyway, knowing the identity of these ghosts when they were alive is still useful for other reasons.”

Victor had pulled himself out of his grumpy mood long enough to stare at Hierro and Guardiola the same way little kids did when they found out that crazy folklore figures didn’t actually bring them holiday presents, but they still had to be good anyway. Now he shook his head and pushed irritably at the hair flopping in his eyes. “We’re not doing any fucking séances,” he said. “And no goddamn possession or channeling or anything like that either.”

“Why would you think about that?” Hierro said.

“But we should talk to them,” Guardiola said.

Then they looked at each other with one of those perpetual disagreements those two had. Hierro hitched back one of his shoulders. “Pep, I am _not_ letting those things get anywhere near—”

“But if we can just talk to them, then perhaps we can find out—”

“Look, _you_ can talk to them if you want,” Iker snapped. “I’ve come as close to talking to them as I want to. I’ve seen plenty of movies about this and they never turn out well, and somehow I don’t think it’d be any better in real life.”

“They’re already getting to Iker anyway, without us trying to help them do that,” Victor added. He slapped down the papers in his hand, then pushed his elbows back onto his knees and glowered at a rather surprised-looking Guardiola. “They’re not good people, whoever they are. I don’t trust them, and I don’t want to try to work with anybody I don’t trust.”

After a moment, Guardiola bowed his head. “I’m sorry if I made either of you uncomfortable. Of course we wouldn’t do anything that might pose a risk to you.”

Iker pressed his lips together and fought down his irritation. On the one hand, he did understand that Guardiola was only trying to help, and maybe in another situation it would’ve been a good suggestion. On the other hand, Guardiola could’ve tried his idea way back when it was him getting the damn nightmares. And on the other _other_ hand, now Hierro was getting that goddamn guilty look on his face, the way he did whenever Guardiola was upset, and the last thing Iker wanted was more of them having their damn apology-arguments in front of him. “It’s not that. I mean, realistically, I kind of doubt there’s a way to get out of this without us having to do something. And I’m fine with doing something, even if it might be dangerous. But I want to know it’ll actually get rid of them, and…and look, what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think just talking to them will tell us anything new. They don’t like what happened way back when and want it changed. That’s it.”

“What about…” Victor started. Then he shied away when Iker looked curiously at him, pulling his shoulders up and staring down at the coffee-table. “You wanted to know if…”

“Yeah, I’d like to know what really happened. If the one guy was left by accident or maybe was murdered. But that’s me,” Iker said after a moment. “They already know what happened to them, so I don’t think looking into that’s going to help.”

Something caught his eye and he automatically stiffened, but it just turned out to be Raúl rubbing his nose. He stopped when they looked at him, then did it again, gazing thoughtfully before him. “Would they? They might not know what happened to each other, if they died separately.”

“But then they’d have to talk to someone,” Guardiola said. He put up his hand right away. “No, Fernando, I’m not saying that—”

“So they can talk to each other and leave Iker out of it,” Victor interrupted.

Iker looked at him, then at the others. “Well, maybe they _can’t_ talk to each other. Maybe that’s what this whole thing is about. We’ve never seen them together.”

“What, so now you want to channel one?” Victor looked skeptical and hurt. “It’s not just about you, you know. You bitch about it, but you know, you don’t fight it that much. Nobody’s fucking making you be a martyr, and if they are, they’re assholes.”

“I didn’t say that,” Iker said, blinking hard. “I just said…”

A flash of regret, maybe, went over Victor’s face. Then he jerked his head away. He kicked the table or something like that—it shook and made the papers slide around, so he put his hand down to hold them still.

“But yeah, so no possession.” Out of the corner of his eye, Iker saw Villa shifting around and prayed that the man would keep his mouth shut. Xavi was sitting next to him and it’d be great if Xavi could whack him in the shins if he set off Victor. “There has to be another way.”

“I think there might be.” Hierro straightened up in his seat, putting the edge of his folded hands against his mouth. He thought for a moment, then lowered his hands, nodding. “Of course, the historical preservation society might have some hard words for me.”

Guardiola snorted. “Fernando, the last dean had hard words for you and I don’t recall that doing anything for my best suit.”

“Are they always like this?” Victor hissed at Iker.

Iker was busy being relieved that the man wasn’t going to sulk for another hour. Then he got around to offering Victor a wry smile. “Explains a lot about me, doesn’t it?”

Victor rolled his eyes, then froze as Hierro abruptly turned on them. Hierro regarded him intently enough so that Iker almost put an arm between them, while Victor grimaced and tried to avoid direct eye contact. Over Hierro’s shoulder, Iker could see Xavi gesturing to ask whether he needed to make a distraction. Iker was about to say yes when Hierro smiled in a very odd…way. Like he was pleased with something, but even beyond that.

“If you ever have problems, do let me know,” Hierro said to Victor. “I’ll be happy to talk to Iker for you. Raúl, I have to make some phone calls, so would you mind if…”

Of course Raúl didn’t mind, and he would just step out for a moment to show Hierro where they’d moved the phone since they’d rewired since the last time he had come, and Guardiola might as well join them since he should make some calls too. And they were out in the hall by the time Iker pulled his hanging jaw back in order. “Talk to me?”

“Don’t deflate another bed, and maybe we’ll let you come back over for dinner, too,” Mori said, affably clapping Iker on the shoulder. He got up, saying something about his turn for dinner. Then he nodded at Victor while he pulled a protesting Villa up to “help” him. “ _You_ can come over whenever you want. I know it’s usually Iker’s fault.”

“It is not!” Iker finally sputtered. “I’m—I’m the nice one! Why the hell…”

Xavi was snickering, and doing a shitty job of hiding it. He flapped an apologetic hand at Iker’s glare but kept snorting into his other hand. Even Victor was looking amused, which…Iker was not sulking. He was not. It was just unfair.

“So…” Silva made pointers with his fingers, then flicked them back and forth between Iker and Victor “…dating?”

“So what the hell is the plan, exactly?” Victor said, back to irritable. He lightened up a little when Iker covertly pushed one hand against his hip, but not much. “Anybody get that before they all left?”

* * *

Hierro came back a few minutes later, before Victor got too worked up and Iker started getting frustrated himself, and provided a few more details. The one ghost appeared to be attached to the cupboard, so they were going to bring that out to where the other ghost’s grave was and hope that would allow the two to…work things out or whatever. The cupboard had never been allowed out of the room since it was a really expensive antique besides being where a homicidal ghost tended to act out, and therefore a bad thing to leave where lots of people might run into it. And Iker wouldn’t have to be there, at least for the first try. They weren’t sure whether the other ghost had gotten stuck to him, or whether it just liked him for some reason. If it was just the second one, then Hierro didn’t want him and Victor there to get hurt again.

Anyway, it was fine with him if they tried it without him first. Mostly. He did feel weirdly disappointed and a little like he’d fallen down on the job—aside from being the one who was getting scared out of his mind every few hours, he hadn’t actually done too much, and he wasn’t going to get a chance to do more if the first try worked. But that was a stupid feeling; it wasn’t like he was _responsible_ for exorcising ghosts. It wasn’t even like he knew anything about it, and exorcisms weren’t really the sort of thing you wanted to screw up by not knowing enough. Better to leave it to Hierro and Guardiola, who had apparently done it before.

Iker blinked at the phone Victor had just pushed across the table to him, then frowned at the other man. Victor sighed and flicked the phone a few centimeters closer. “If you’re going to be like this about it, you might as well call Xavi and get him to run commentary for you.”

“I think they’re making him wait back in the car, so he’s not going to see anything,” Iker muttered. He put his chin down on his folded arms and looked at the phone. “I’m fine.”

“Sure.” Victor sounded absolutely non-convinced. He pushed himself back and slumped down in his seat till his head was resting on the top of his chair. “God, this is going to be a long night.”

“Well, so go do whatever, no need to wait on me.” Okay, maybe Iker was being a dick again. All Victor was trying to do was to make him feel better, as best as the man could. He should respect that.

Victor looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached over and took back his phone, and flipped it open so he could…play some game on it. Little electronic beeping noises with the occasional tinny ‘you win!’ outburst. He glanced up when Iker’s chair scraped against the floor, but then went back to his game. He didn’t even look that annoyed—he blew his breath out of the side of his mouth, sure, but it was more like he was putting up with babysitting some little kid than anything else.

“I’m going to get something to eat,” Iker said, not moving.

After another moment, Victor put down his phone and looked half-skeptically, half-irritably at Iker. “Do we have to go through this every single time?”

“What?”

“ _This_.” Victor waved his hand in Iker’s general direction. “This—where you’re freaked out but you won’t face up to it, because you’re Casillas the campus mascot who’s also a total idiot.”

Iker opened his mouth, then shut it and slumped in his chair. He rubbed at the side of his face. “I’m not an idiot.”

“Well, you do a great impression of one,” Victor muttered. He glanced at his phone, then picked it up again. After some button-pushing, he gave Iker a sideways look. “I’m texting Andrés about the second shitty night I’m having in a row, babysitting you.”

“Because getting scratched at least ends right away, while nightmares…” Then Iker’s hand made it to his mouth and he couldn’t talk anymore. He pushed at his lips a few times before letting his hand fall to his side. One of his feet scuffed against the floor, probably his right one. He wasn’t really paying attention.

Eventually he realized Victor was also looking out the window. He jerked his head away, then pulled himself up to put his elbows on the table as Victor pushed away from it. Iker pushed his face into his hands and listened to Victor pulling the curtains shut. They’d redoused everything in holy water and then added sprinkles of salt, and probably some herbs, too. Raúl and Guardiola had been sort of discuss-debating about whether that last one would really help when Iker had decided he was going to leave the room, but in Iker’s experience, Raúl usually won those.

It was nice of them to keep trying, but at this point, Iker really wasn’t believing that anything would hold off the ghosts if they really wanted to get at him. Which again, begged the question of just how keeping him away from the cemetery was going to do any good—he needed to stop. To stop, and just trust that his friends would help him, because they were his friends and that was what friends did and he was just being twitchy.

“Why don’t you just call him?” Iker asked. He heard Victor stop beside him and moved his head enough for his right eye to peer at the other man. “Iniesta.”

Victor brought his chair over and sat down by Iker with his knees spread and his arms balanced on them. He played with his phone a bit, then shrugged. “He was really freaked when he saw my scratches, almost didn’t want me to keep looking into things. I don’t know if I want to get him upset again. He’s got exams anyway.”

“I feel like I’m being babysat,” Iker said after another moment. He pressed his fingertips into his forehead, just above the eyebrows. “Like usual, while they go off to fix it.”

“Well, because nobody wants you to get clawed up like me,” Victor said, his voice jumping with incredulity. He poked Iker in the arm. “Look, it wasn’t fucking fun. You don’t want to do it.”

Iker jerked his arm away, then sighed and pulled his hands off his face. “Or get strangled like Guardiola, yeah, I know.”

“Nobody’s saying you’re a coward. Not even Villa.” Victor prodded Iker again. “Because you’re _not_. It’s a good point, if we’re there and it gets worse—”

“Is that what you’re telling yourself?” Iker asked.

He regretted it almost before Victor’s face stiffened up. Iker reached for the other man, but Victor smacked away the hand. Then got halfway out of his chair before his face shifted again and he dropped back down with a disgusted sigh.

“I’m sorry,” Iker said, before the other man could speak. “No, I’m a dick, and you’re a lot less screwed up than everybody makes out, and—”

“I don’t know about that,” Victor muttered.

Iker paused, then laughed. He put his head down on the table, mostly ignoring the dirty look he was getting from Victor. “Okay, are we doing this again too? Because you’re not that fucked-up if you’re hanging around trying to convince me not to get myself killed.”

“By ghosts.” Victor still looked like he was cataloging all the ways that Iker was wrong about him, but he did manage a quirked brow. “How is that not crazy?”

“Well, it _is_ , but it’s not because you’re crazy.” They let that one sit there and marinate for a bit, and then Iker picked his head off the table. “Okay, you had some moments, but so did I, and…and so has pretty much everybody else. Except maybe for Xavi, but he doesn’t hang out here as much.”

Victor made some sort of noise that maybe was agreeing and that maybe was just done with the subject. He was pushing himself around in his chair, glancing here and there, like he was nervous about something but not like he was…was thinking they were going to be terrified senseless in the next few minutes. Then he flopped back and stared at Iker. His face looked odd, and it took a moment for Iker to pick up on the man’s rising blush.

“So—I know they’re family friends and all that—” Victor started uncertainly “—but…Hierro and Guardiola…do you…do you ever…”

“Mostly, I try not to think about it,” Iker said. Then for some reason he felt he needed to explain more, and he started flapping his hand around like that was going to clear things up. “He and Guardiola, they’ve always been like that. But—it’s just, they get into my shit all the _time_ , just because they’ve known my parents forever, and if I started asking questions about them, then they’d have a real reason to do that. To give me advice. Or something. And that’d just be weird.”

“They already give you advice,” Victor just had to say.

Iker dropped back in his chair till his head hit the top of it and stared at the ceiling. “And it’s fucking _weird_. Not to mention humiliating.” He just laid there and felt the edge of the chair grind into the back of his skull. Not really how he wanted to be distracted, he thought, and then he sighed. It wasn’t like he had much of a selection. “You seem to be okay with it now. That part of your crazy?”

When Victor didn’t respond right away, Iker pulled back his shoulders and got ready to talk the other man down. But Victor was just looking thoughtfully at him, not offended or insecure or any of his other reasons for having a fit. “Maybe the ghosts gave me a sense of humor,” he said.

After a moment, Iker laughed and pulled himself up a bit. He rolled his head so he could look more comfortably at the other man. “That would be the good kind of crazy, so I hope so.”

Victor snorted and looked away, running one hand back into his hair. “You’re really an ass, you know. And have you ever thought about just not kissing people where they’re going to walk in on it?”

“Yeah,” Iker answered, getting out of his chair. He half-saw Victor tensing up, but just kept going around the other man to the floor where they’d set up another airbed. He sat down on it, testing its resiliency, and then laid down on his back.

“I think this one might be Silva’s,” Victor said after a moment. He twisted around in his chair and folded his arms around the top of it, looking down at Iker’s feet hanging off the bed.

More like Iker’s legs, since they were unsupported nearly up to the knee. He sighed and pulled them up till his feet were on the bed. Then he put his feet back down on the floor so his thighs wouldn’t cramp up. “It doesn’t matter. Wherever the hell I am, one of them manages to show up. Trust me, okay? I’ve tested it, and you would not believe how often Hierro has been out on some stupid errand, or Raúl was trying to find a book, or…or Mori just _happens_ to have the same taste in music as me…”

“So it’s better to just do it where they’re absolutely guaranteed to come?” Victor was off the chair now and crawling on his hands and knees over the mattress, coming up on Iker’s right side. Once their heads were level, he plopped down on his forearms.

Iker looked at him for a moment. It wasn’t that Victor was really flirting—at least, Iker didn’t think so, but Victor without some sort of scowl on his face was still new enough so that maybe Iker just wasn’t recognizing the differences in the man’s non-grumpy expressions. But there was _something_. “We’re totally trying not to think about it.”

“And it was kind of working till you brought it up,” Victor snapped. He pushed like he was getting up, then settled down again. He eyed Iker like he thought Iker might mutate or something like that, then snorted and looked away. “It’s not just—I’m not getting walked in on by all these professors just because I don’t want to think about ghosts.”

“Oh, so you like me now?” Iker asked lightly.

Victor looked back at him. Didn’t even blink. “Yeah.”

And kept looking at him, and right, they were going to do _that_ conversation now. Before they even knew how the ghost-thing was going, and Victor was really fucking bizarre if he could push that to the side. They hadn’t even been civil to each other for that long—Iker took a moment and did the math in his head. About two days, and they’d been running around like panicky chickens for a lot of that time, and making out for the rest, which was not what Iker would’ve called a great basis for evaluation of...of...of a thing. A thing with them. Plus all the non-ghost weirdness that was somehow not putting Victor off, and—and—

Iker was being a total coward. Jesus. He put his hand over his face and took a couple deep breaths. Then he took his hand off and was going to say something…something rational and responsive and responsible, because he _was_ a grown adult and knew what he was doing and knew what the consequences could be, and Victor kissed him instead.

The mattress creaked as Iker’s head dropped back into it. Then some more as Victor moved himself on top of Iker, one hand supporting Iker’s jaw as their kisses started getting less hey-shut-up and more _fuck_ , that’s good. “I don’t think my eyes bug out as much as you when I freak out,” he said in between tangles with Iker’s tongue. His other hand fluttered against Iker’s shoulder, and maybe it was for balance at first but then it was stroking up Iker’s neck with a different motive in mind. “Do you know how weird it is for me to be the calmer one?”

“Well, that’s me, always trying to people help out.” Iker wondered where his own hands had gone and located them on Victor’s ribs, one fisting in the man’s shirt while the other was rubbing its thumb over the man’s chest. Like Victor was a cat, and then his thumb ran over a nub of something in that flat plane of muscle and Victor arched, and—and there had been some kind of comparison in Iker’s head but he forgot it. “Um—uh—look—I’m—I wasn’t coming onto you just because it was, was some kind of—personal issue—with the ghosts or even Hierro—”

Victor sealed his mouth over Iker’s, lips not matching up, not even touching in some places but closing it off, making it one fucking _hot_ point of contact where everything just ran together. In a good way. A really, really good way.

“I kind of got that,” Victor said when they broke apart. His voice was all raspy because he didn’t have enough breath, but he was still kind of smug with his eyes all light like that, and Iker liked it a lot better than all that defensiveness. “Can we just—do this right now? Okay? Since we can’t do the other thing, and we suck at waiting around?”

“Okay.” Iker reached up and touched the side of Victor’s brow for no reason. Then he let his fingers drift down the man’s face because he wanted to. “Also because you like me, right?”

Kissing somebody’s fingertips wasn’t supposed to look sarcastic, but Victor managed that. Then he nuzzled at Iker’s palm, his lower lip rolling to track a faint dampness across the hollow, his eyes half-shut, and that wasn’t sarcastic. “Dick.”

“Yep.” Next Iker wanted to run his fingers down Victor’s throat, because it was all long and stretched over him, but Victor bent down again before he could. He made do with grabbing the man’s jeans by the belt-loops and pulling all of Victor down.

Victor arched almost as soon as he’d landed, his mouth sliding off onto Iker’s cheek as he hissed and swore, his knees jabbing the mattress and Iker. Which probably did bruise something, but it wasn’t enough for Iker to push the other man away. On the contrary, he grabbed the back of one thigh and held on while Victor’s writhing slowly turned into something a little more deliberate, long rubbing slides that made Iker grind his head back into the bed.

Something bobbed in and out of Iker’s vision when he did that, but it took him a couple blinks—Victor was mouthing at his throat, all nips and licks—to get what it was. The door wasn’t all the way shut.

“They’re at the cemetery,” Victor mumbled. Then he bit Iker’s collarbone. “For fuck’s sake.”

“I know, but you don’t get it, they _always_ …” Iker’s head lolled sideways because now Victor was sucking at the join of his jaw and neck. He lost sight of the door and instead looked at the thick black hair moving under his chin. His hand went to Victor’s shoulder, then ran down Victor’s back to the slight dip just above the hip, where Victor’s shirt was coming out of his jeans and Iker could press his fingers to warm skin. “Villa’s still here. Maybe Mori, too.”

“So what?” Victor said, pulling back to look at Iker. He was all flushed, red tipping his cheekbones and nose and mouth, and annoyed too and for some reason annoyed him was starting to look really good to Iker. “Does it throw you off that much?”

Iker thought about it. With his hand up Victor’s shirt, splayed into the small of the man’s back, and his other hand kneading at Victor’s thigh, and yeah, he was a fucking idiot. He was _thinking_ about it. “It doesn’t throw you?”

“Crazy,” Victor offered. Then he went back to working his mouth along Iker’s jaw.

Okay. Okay, well, then…Iker moved his hand inside Victor’s leg, pushing down with his fingers till he pushed something that shifted slightly and Victor swore against his throat, pressing himself down into Iker till Iker almost couldn’t breathe. Iker slid his other hand back to Victor’s ribs to get some space and Victor flinched on him.

Right, those scratches. He tracked his hand away from the danger area and onto Victor’s belt instead, trying to get it off. It took a while. It was fucking annoying, and he ended up biting Victor’s earlobe out of frustration, and yeah, he was lucky Victor turned out to like that. Anyway, it also made Victor twist so things were a little easier and the belt finally came off. While Iker was at it, he got the top button of Victor’s jeans, too.

Iker wasn’t wearing a belt, so Victor pretty much just shoved his hand down the front of Iker’s jeans. And Jesus _Christ_ , Iker came so fucking close to kneeing the other man and he didn’t want to do that, he really, really didn’t want to do that but Victor could—warn Iker or something. Or make out with him some more. That worked.

They rolled onto their sides at some point while Iker was fighting with Victor’s fly, because yeah, he would get clumsy now, and Victor would _not_ , already having Iker’s jeans bunching around his knees and palming Iker’s erection so Iker kept having to stop and actually remember why he had his hand where it was. And _then_ —and then something sort of snapped and Iker was gasping, jerking, feeling damp and sticky between him and Victor’s hand, and…and it was good but he was kind of disappointed. He hadn’t been ready for it to be over yet.

Well, there was still Victor, squirming against Iker’s slack fingers and messily sucking at Iker’s throat. Iker got the clothes out of the way with a few quick tugs, then—hell, why not. He shoved Victor over, heard a distant thump and a curse that he didn’t pay attention to, and put his mouth over the head of the other man’s cock. Victor cursed again, like something was sticking in his throat, and Iker grinned. It made Victor buck and Iker had to hold down the man by the leg to keep his teeth from being broken. Then, since his hands were there anyway, he pushed his thumbs across Victor’s balls.

Victor cursed a third time, not angry, just fierce and desperate. His hand batted at Iker’s shoulder but Iker shrugged it off, because hell, why _not_ , and swallowed down the man’s climax.

He’d fallen halfway off the bed, Iker saw as he pushed himself up. And since Victor didn’t really look like he was about to fix that any time soon, Iker grabbed a leg and then an arm and pulled him back on it. Then Victor stirred a little, turning to look up at Iker. His eyes were still dazed, like somebody had fogged them over, but it was the kind of shimmery fog that only came up in the summer when the ground was so hot water would boil on it. Iker swallowed again, and not because he had to.

“You didn’t have to…” Victor started. Then he shook his head. He tugged himself a little closer, then stopped when Iker pushed up against him. His breath stopped just a moment before Iker kissed him, so it was still sweet and light in his mouth.

“So it was awesome, but you’re getting shit all over my jeans,” Iker said when they separated. He nodded down at the hand Victor had on his leg, then turned to look at the bed. “And probably we should make sure Silva doesn’t kill us. I don’t want to worry about my coffee being pois—”

Victor pushed him nearly onto his back with the kiss, then got up with a half-hearted grunt of annoyance. “ _Dick_.”

“Crazy,” Iker retorted, and then put out his hand to be helped up.

* * *

From the sound of things, somebody was cooking in the kitchen and somebody else was arguing with them, so it probably wasn’t necessary to be tiptoeing around the place. But it was old habit with Iker and he didn’t really want to spare the energy to change that when he was trying to make sure Victor didn’t have an eleventh-hour breakdown on him.

So far, so good. They’d sneaked into the nearest bathroom to clean up, and thanks to the renovations, Raúl had zillions of different types of cleaning solutions around the place. Victor had agreeably grabbed a handful of toilet paper while Iker found something for the airbed, and then had walked back with Iker to the room without looking particularly freaked out. He did wonder aloud whether they should call, since it’d been a while, but he just looked curious plus a little tense, which was more than reasonable given the circumstances.

“It’s not that bad,” Victor said, looking down at the bed. He slid one foot under a corner and lifted it, then took away his foot and got down on his knees. “Here, give me the bottle.”

Iker handed that over to him and was about to get down himself when his phone went off. He and Victor looked at each other. Then his phone rang again and he caught his nail on his pocket trying to scrabble it out. He bit his lip and made himself pull out the phone more calmly. “Xavi.” He put it up to his ear. “How’d it go?”

Silence.

“What’d he say?” Victor asked.

Iker started to reply, then took the phone away from his head and looked at it. His phone was definitely saying it was Xavi’s number. He put it back to his ear. “Xavi? Xavi?”

Still silence.

Suddenly cold, Iker yanked the phone down and stuffed it back into his jeans. He stared blankly forward, only vaguely aware of Victor’s voice rising in volume. Then he frowned as he realized he was looking at the curtained window. And he thought he’d seen one of the curtains moving.

“—wait! I’m calling him!” The swing of Victor’s hand just grazed Iker’s leg. Then the other man stumbled up after Iker, but he got tangled up in something, probably the mattress. “Iker, damn it, just—wait a moment—it’s ringing—wait and _Xavi_! Xavi, what the hell—”

But Iker already had yanked the curtains open. He stared for one second at the pale, pale face on the other side.

Then he’d whipped around and Victor was reaching for him, just as ashen, and Iker _knew_ the other man had finally seen it. He got a step away, heard wood and metal grating and tried to twist but got caught by the arm. And then he was out the window, falling hard on the ground. Scraped raw all over, the length of his left forearm stinging really badly, and an iron grip around his right wrist.

Iker didn’t even bother trying to look. He threw his weight down, dug in his heels, clawed up grass and dirt that jammed under his nails, but he was still being pulled along. They were already at the end of Raúl’s lawn and he tried to grab for a tree but missed and was jerked off his feet for his pains.

He had no idea how far they got before he got back onto his feet, but they weren’t by Raúl’s house anymore. The thing that had him wasn’t giving away no matter how much he struggled and he was starting to lose the feeling in his wrist. He kept trying, but he didn’t even have the breath left to scream.

But somebody _was_ screaming—screaming his name over and over, like he was dying. He thought maybe it was the thing that had him, but he didn’t want to look at it. The grip on his arm was starting to burn and he didn’t want to see what that was, didn’t want to know, didn’t want anything except to get away. He tried to swing them down again but just slewed sideways and nearly lost his balance again, which he was not going to fucking do. He wasn’t going to fall.

Iker kicked out blindly and his foot got stuck for a moment, but the pull on his arm didn’t stop. His shoulder popped and he wondered through the excruciating pain whether it’d dislocated, and then his foot came free. He hurt too much to resist but his free arm went out anyway and something grabbed it. That screaming came right up into his face and he went over and his back slammed into something hard. He stumbled, fought to stay on his feet and then felt them slip out from under him.

A warm body smashed into his own, then stayed there to trap him in place. Victor, not screaming now, just breathing like his lungs were going to burst any moment, and digging his fingers into Iker’s bicep down to the bone. And his other arm was pushed forward—Iker followed it and saw Victor’s hand wrapped around something dark that then went down around Iker’s wrist. He saw Victor’s face, lips peeled back from clenched teeth.

Then they dropped onto the ground. Iker seized Victor, then yanked his hand away as his arm from fingertips to shoulder burned viciously. Then he hissed and twisted his head—his hand was free, how was his hand free—and—

It was standing there, with the house at its back. It was all black, but there were shades of black, almost enough for detail, and they were shifting constantly but Iker thought he glimpsed a furious eye, a snarling mouth. Its hands were raised over them and he thought it was going to grab them _both_.

But then this cold—it was thicker than plain air and it wasn’t just a breeze. It was cold and Iker felt it go over the top of him, and then the thing got blurry, like something else was standing between it and them. And there was another thing that came up from behind, a thing with a pale face that Iker glimpsed only for a moment, and another scream—not Victor, with his breath catching hard against Iker’s neck. The black thing smeared out like an ink blot.

Then it was gone. They were lying on the grass by themselves, shaking and tangled, and the house was just there. Wait. All the lights were on. Then off.

“It—dragged you,” Victor said in a shivery whisper. “Through the window. I couldn’t get you in time, so I—I ran after, and I think there was this thing by me, and it pushed me once, when you went around a corner and I didn’t know which way, and—I didn’t get you, I’m so sorry, I didn’t—”

Iker’s arm still felt like seven kinds of pain and his other one, his good one, it was locked around Victor just in case. So he made the man stop with his mouth, and then held on till he felt Victor soften. Then he pressed their foreheads together.

“But you did,” he said. “You did.”

* * *

Raúl dug up the records later. The one who’d been beaten and arrested had been taken on suspicion of harboring a rebel. He’d never fully woken after the beating, but his family had noted that he would mutter wildly about having to return and unlocking something, making someone unlock something. When he’d been arrested, it had been on the edge of the mansion’s grounds and at first they hadn’t known whether he had been going to or coming from it. But then the man who had informed at him, who’d been there, had sworn that he’d seen the prisoner going there. When a member of the prisoner’s family had persisted, the informer had agreed to search the mansion but he had done it himself and had reported finding no one.

All three of them had known each other, and had even been teammates for a time on the same football team. The informer had been the star striker, and the year before hostilities had broken out, had scored the most goals in their league. He’d also held a post in the city government, so between that and his fame as a footballer, most people believed his version. Not everyone—there had been some rumors of a failed love affair between the informer and the woman who’d eventually become the wife of the man who’d died locked up in the cupboard. Iker had always known he was right to root for the goalkeepers.

As for what had happened in the cemetery, they had taken out the cupboard and set it by the graves—the two friends had been buried near each other, so apparently their families had drawn the same conclusions as Iker had—but nothing had happened for a long time. Then Xavi said he’d seen something like a shadow wisp up out of the grave of the arrested man, right around the time Iker had gotten that strange phone call. Then it had darted away, and suddenly Hierro had snapped for everyone to go to the house. Xavi also said he hadn’t called anybody till Victor had called him.

He hadn’t been close enough to see the cupboard. Hierro had, and when pressed, he had admitted to feeling something he couldn’t see move out of it towards the arrested man’s grave. Guardiola added quietly that he’d thought he’d heard excited voices, but only for a few seconds and not nearly loud enough to make out any words. Then they’d all gone to the house and found Iker and Victor sitting on the lawn, trying to work up the effort to at least call for help. Victor had nearly torn his lungs running after Iker, and Iker hadn’t been in much better shape. 

Hierro wrote excuses for everyone, even Villa who hadn’t even seen half of it but who was still bitching about Silva’s airbed anyway. Iker was pretty sure that he made Figo do something to the house and to Iker’s and Victor’s apartment buildings, even though Iker didn’t think there would be any more problems. It was a nice _thought_ of Hierro’s, Iker reluctantly supposed. And normally he didn’t mind seeing Figo, but if he had a couple days off and Victor’s DVD box-sets to work through, he preferred to do it without that sort of commentary. Victor still was a moody bastard, and Iker still probably was a jerk a little more often than he strictly needed to be, and the ghosts hadn’t changed that, after all.

“I guess he’s not that bad, compared to some of the others,” Victor said, frowning down at his camera. He bit his lip and poked at buttons, trying to find the magic combination that would defog all the otherwise beautiful forest shots. Then he looked up at Iker, sighed and went back to fiddling. “Don’t look that relieved. He embarrasses Andrés again, I’m going to punch him.”

“Well, he’s not a professor,” Iker replied after a moment. He shrugged at Victor’s second look, then looked away so he could smirk in peace. The ghosts hadn’t changed things, but things _had_ changed, and they were pretty good from where he was standing. No point in ruining it early. “Luís is one guy who’s completely capable of taking whatever he’s got coming to him. It would piss off Guardiola, though.”

Victor grimaced. “Andrés really liked that sports law class he took with him. Is Xavi done over there?”

Iker leaned against his tree, eased down the end of the boom handle, and peeked at the other side of the hillside. From what he could see, Xavi was still rummaging around under a half-rotted log. It’d been _Xavi’s_ idea, but now that they were actually doing it, he was getting really protective about his hunting spots and insisting that they disguise them before shooting so people wouldn’t come raid them later. Which Iker could understand intellectually; on a practical level, Iker was hungry and tired and still recovering, damn it. He hadn’t gotten anything broken, though the doctors had tsked over his shoulder a bit, but that didn’t mean he was ready to go hiking up every mountainside. Especially with how lumpy Victor’s bed was.

“We’re not.” When Iker looked up, Victor rolled his eyes. He was really starting to look like Xavi when he did that. “We’re finishing this goddamn project so I can go home and watch Barcelona with Andrés. We’re not making out _now_.”

After a moment, Iker carefully set the boom by the tree. He went over to Victor and raised his hands in the air at the suspicious look he got. “No petting, got it. I just want to see what we’ve got so far.”

Victor grudgingly tilted the camera so Iker could look at the screen, then flicked through some of their footage. He looked a little less annoyed when Iker complimented one shot, then even unbent enough for them to talk about how to get rid of the weird green cast on another sequence. Then he started shifting on his feet and looking around, so finally Iker had to poke him.

“Xavi’s still down there.” Iker tried to tip the camera so he could see if that blurry spot was really in the footage or if it was just dirt on the screen. “You can try to tell him to hurry up, but trust me, it’s not going to work.”

“It wasn’t that.” The funny catch to Victor’s voice made Iker look up; Victor shied away from his eyes, blushing furiously. “It just—well, none of them hike, do they? Or hunt mushrooms?”

Iker meditated on the camera in his hands, Xavi less than a hundred meters away, and the fact that Hierro had gotten them a break but would absolutely not get them out of this damn project. And the way Victor was biting his lip again. “I think Guardiola eats mushrooms.”

Victor made an irritated noise low in his throat, because his mouth and tongue were busy. Then he moaned, and helped Iker put the camera down on their bags. Xavi was going to kick their shins black and blue whenever he pulled his head out from under that log, but until then, Iker wasn’t going to give a damn about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Xavi's mushroom hunting is fact.
> 
> Originally written in 2011.


End file.
